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.
