By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
It would be a very interesting complement to the study of revolutionary psychological warfare to analyze that which was the Church’s counter-revolutionary psychological warfare of that time. Because chivalry was a set of truths that the Church mobilized for the use of the combatants and exposed not only in the form of ideas but through symbols, rites, habits, saints, extraordinary examples, etc. in order to complete the notion of chivalry. And it was exactly with this ideal of chivalry that the Church managed to do the Crusades and defeat the adversary.
Top row, L to R: St. Joan of Arc, St. Nuno Álvares Pereira, King St. Ferdinand III. Bottom Row: St. Jadwiga of Poland, King St. Louis IX & St. Ivo of Kermartin (also called St. Yves).
In other words, anyone who thought that without the ideal of Crusade and chivalry [they are not the same but are connected ideas] it would have been possible for Europe to close its gates to the Moors would be fantasying. This is not true. Europe would have succumbed.
So that was a sublime ideal that the Church drew from her own treasures – Revelation and Tradition, the Magisterium and Tradition – and with that the Church animated people’s mentalities.
(Excerpt from a Chá, Sunday, Sept. 24, 1989 – Nobility.org translation)
