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Our Lady of Victory
A
GRATEFUL CHRISTENDOM several times in history has had Mary to thank for
victories that saved it. The first of these occurred at Muret, September
13, 1213. True to her name, the mother of mankind acted for the good of
the defeated as much as for the victorious, and none of her children in
southern France now regrets her benevolent intervention. She was really
rescuing the rights of the human body to life and of all materiality to
respect against a relentless aggression. The battle of Muret, it may be
said, started in church. There was a Mass in progress at the altar and
the portals stood wide open to allow an array of mounted knights out in
the September morning to follow as best they could the actions of the
celebrant. Some few of the brigade had crossed the threshold, staying in
saddle, riding in behind Simon de Montfort. What with their horses
standing within and the others lined up outside the building, it made an
unusual sight. But it was a display so earnest that even the swishing of
the tails during the liturgical silences, or the stamp of a hoof on the
sacred floor, did not sound out of place. It was a preparation for
battle.
The Mass at an end, the fate of civilization
rode with that select band of equestrians as they cantered southward to
meet the enemy, who outnumbered them: in horsemen three to one, and if the
estimate takes into account the opposing infantry, then a hundred to one.
A thousand against a hundred thousand! What chance had the crusaders? It
looked to be, by every calculation known to common sense, a suicide
charge.
But back in the Church of Saint-Jacques a
lonely figure remained. Against such ridiculously unbalanced odds, the
historian who excludes this key figure from his consideration will be at a
loss to explain the incredible outcome of the battle of Muret. The
priest, who had offered the Mass and with his blessing sent that small
army on its way, was now beseeching some unseen power to redress the
balance, make the attack stand up, bring it victory. He knelt before the
altar in prayer.
Was it the rosary he prayed? A legend holding
its own to this day would have it so, a legend not unworthy of acceptance,
since the rosary has a history consonant to the claims of the legend. Say
he was not, it still must be granted that he invoked the Queen of the
Rosary: or why did Simon, who attributed the victory to him, then back up
the tribute by having a chapel erected to Our Lady in the church where his
friend had prayed? The truth is, whoever thinks the suppliant did not
implore the Mother of the Church in such a crisis knows nothing of the
man. He was St. Dominic.
The menace then was the Albigensian heresy. It
preached a double God, half bad, half good. It held that the whole
material side of creation derives from the sinister half of this
Omnipotence, and only the spiritual from the beneficent. Such a creed
could not but lead to frightful excesses: a war on all physical life, from
babies to the growth of flowers and plants. Implacable foe of the flesh
as incurably evil, the Albigenses justified suicide on the grounds that it
delivered the soul from its carnal imprisonment, and abolished matrimony
because it promoted the birth of more detestable bodies. Far better
concubinage than marriage! It cut down the risk of having a family.
The Cathari, meaning the perfect or pure
ones, lived in the inhuman doctrines to the full. The weaker members of
the sect, who failed to practice the ideal, were known as mere believers.
They formed the lukewarm majority who married and, ironically, gave the
Albigenses their sole hope of transmitting their creed to future ages.
For obviously there had to be children—whose very conception was
forbidden—to perpetuate the cult. It strikes the eye like a misprint. It
is wholly lacking in sense. Nevertheless, so it stands in history.
The Manichean blight had already infected more
than a thousand cities and towns, when Pope Innocent III called for a
crusade against it. The call to action was none too soon. Having
subjugated southern France, together with large areas of northern Italy,
the Albigensian juggernaut was prepared, with strong political support, to
ride roughshod over the whole of France. Indeed, it had no intention of
stopping there. If left unchecked, it would ravage the whole of
Christendom.
But why, when war was outlawed by the sect, did
a good percentage of Albigenses betray such willingness to wage it?
Apparently, the father of confusion had them so confused that they had
forgotten how to behave logically. They surely welcomed the military aid
and leadership which they now received from the King of Aragon. Neither
King Pedro nor his soldiers, of course, had crossed the Pyrenees out of
sympathy for the heresy. Theirs was another motive altogether. They saw
in the struggle an opportunity to weaken French power and, accordingly
joined ranks with what they despised.
They should have known better. The Holy
Father, whom they recognized as the Vicar of Christ, had made perfectly
clear what the issue was. They should have known further from the
preaching of their own countryman, St. Dominic, that the Mother of God
herself would take a hand in this dire threat to all mankind. The
monstrous thing that would have dissolved human society could not cope
with opposition of that kind. In its most confident hour, it met a defeat
from which it could not recover. It was stopped cold at Muret. King
Pedro was killed in the battle, and his mixed troops, despite their
overwhelming numbers, were themselves overwhelmed. Muret proved to be the
Waterloo of this second Manichean attack upon human nature, including very
emphatically the Incarnation. St. Dominic had not preached and prayed in
vain.
The Albigensian threat, not worse than many
another, raises a recurrent question. What is it that gets into people
from time to time to drive them to such collective madness? What is it
that goads large groups, even entire nations, into working against their
own best interests by opposing and annihilating the sanest and most
beautiful elements in life? Why, to come back to the case in hand, should
a folk of the high culture of the Provencals suddenly have found
themselves destroying flowers, architecture, babies? Why should Catholics
like Pedro and his Aragonese have been willing to smother their loftiest
convictions in mean political aims? Why, for that matter, should de
Montfort later have allowed his dedicated bravery to lapse into selfish
aggression, ambition, greed? Or why, in our own day, should the
intelligentsia have so largely fallen prey to the propaganda of a
government which features brainwashing, slave labor, the concentration
camp, the slaughter of untold millions of human lives beyond any excess
ever known to history?
He has given us the answer from whom alone we
can receive it with absolute certitude. "Simon, Simon," said the One who
truly knows whence the trouble springs, and who by his sympathy showed how
divinely concerned he is, "behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he
might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may
not fail" (Lk. 22:31). There, with omniscient solicitude, our blessed
Lord exposes the hidden troublemaker who is as venomous as he is
insidious, but whose hatred is not—as he tricked the poor Albigenses into
believing—omnipotent.
Peter did not succumb: the prayer of the Son of
God was too much for Satan. Nevertheless, to the final resource of his
evil cunning, the tempter tried. He assailed Peter's personality from
every side, finding always its most susceptible point. He played on the
man's impetuosity until it swelled into overconfidence, which in turn
lapsed at the touch of fear into an ignoble denial of his divine Master.
He prompted the unwary apostle after the great confession, "You are the
Christ, the Son of the living God," to entreat the Savior not to undergo
his announced passion and death. On the part of Peter, it was nothing but
an impulsive burst of sympathy that pleaded in the words, "God forbid,
Lord! This shall never happen to you." But Jesus was not deceived. He
understood who it was that spoke through Peter, and he told the schemer
with shattering finality: "Get behind me, Satan" (Mt. 16:16-23).
With one other of our race, evil could have no
success. And this, since Mary is as much creature as he, may be an even
worse humiliation to Satan. That a being of flesh and blood queens it
over the angels, while one of the joys of heaven, infuriates hell. The
fallen spirits find it intolerable that their lost places should be taken
by the children of men—animals
no less! They therefore—use every wile known to their malice, to defeat
the possibility. St. Paul, surmising the diabolic source of so many human
animosities and wishing to alert his fellow men against being duped into
hatreds between this faction and that, sounds the warning strong and
clear: "We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against . . .
the spiritual hosts of wickedness" (Eph. 6:12).
Yet, much to their chagrin, throughout their
incessant warfare upon our weakness the Mother of God remains our own
understanding mother. From her ineffable glory there reaches down to us,
out of her maternal heart, a solicitude that has behind it the full
strength of the divine will: it was bequeathed to us from the cross.
Combine such love with such power and you can see why, in a crisis as
hopeless as that of Muret, St. Dominic could overturn odds that stagger
the imagination. He knew whom to ask for help.
So did the innumerable forces of the rosary
crusade that prayed for victory, under similar circumstances, three and a
half centuries later. Sultan Selim II had proclaimed his intention of
tearing down the cross atop the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, and placing
the crescent there instead. The boast did not sound hollow.
Constantinople had fallen to Moslem power a century before; more recently,
Hungary too; Italy might well be next.
The sultan dominated the Mediterranean, which
prompted the jest that it was become a Moslem lake. He meant to keep it
so. His proud armada of near three hundred ships, huddled off the coast
of Lepanto, looked perfectly able to execute his will as the Christian
fleet sailed into the Gulf of Patras on October 7, 1571. The watching
Turks had no fear. Confidence ran high among them. They had never lost a
naval encounter. They did not figure to lose this one. All they required
was time, they thought, to pound into submission the inferior squadrons
that dared attack them. Somehow they miscalculated. It proved to be a
battle to the death, although during the first hours the infidels had it
decidedly their way.
Suddenly a strange thing happened. The enemy
for no discernible reason began to tire, then to panic, as the
Encylopaedia Britannia points out, while the onslaught led by Don John
of Austria gained in vigor. The turn of advantage sapped the morale of
the Ottomans, who soon had none of it left. They saw to their dismay
fifty of their vessels either sink or burn, surrendered well over a
hundred others, and with what remained to them beat a retreat. They
wanted no more of Lepanto, where the victors now embraced upward of twelve
thousand fellow Christians delivered from slavery on the Turkish galleys.
The statistics vary from one encyclopedia to another—not by much. It was
a catastrophic victory, worldwide in effect, important to the future, and
the more sensational for having been rated by the sophisticates of this
world a ridiculous improbability.
Some historians are content; to leave it at
that. But in the interest of truth they ought to mention, if only as a
coincidence, the supplementary facts which many consider directly
causative. To begin with the first, an innumerable multitude at home and
in church had gone down on their knees to the Mother of God, and
processions marched the streets of Rome in her honor, to do what Pope St.
Pius V had pleaded with them to do. They all prayed for victory. They
all prayed the rosary.
Then, when the moment for action came, the
Christian fleet rowed vigorously into battle with the strangest rallying
cry in history: "Vittoria! Vittoria! Viva Christo!" This
continual shout, from every unit of the armada, after a while on some of
the ships gave way to the imploring strains of the Salve Regina
which blended with the slogan and with it resounded encouragingly over the
waters. Conformably with which, and no less to the point, Don John who
commanded the armada from its central ship had brought abroad a cherished
picture of the Madonna (the "s. Maria succure miseris" now on
display in the Church of St. Peter of Maiella at Naples). It was not on
idle display here. It served a profound need. In the thick of the battle
the supreme commander left his post to hurry down to the chapel below deck
and before the image of Mary speak to her in heaven. It was a stroke of
ingenuity, his confident SOS to the Mother of God. He went back—to turn
the tide of battle completely around.
This "last knight of Europe" merited his heroic
treatment from G. K. Chesterton. However, to keep the truth in
proportion, he was anything but a lonely hero among so many courageous
comrades at arms who with him fought off the assault on Christendom,
turning it back, thoroughly routing it. And what they shared in common,
the copious records affirm, was the conviction that a heavenly ally
stronger than they had shown her hand in the illustrious victory. Check
the statements attributable to them—Cervantes, for instance, whose fondest
boast thereafter was that he sustained at Lepanto two wounds in the chest
and a maimed left hand—and you will admire the humility, the wisdom, the
valor of their faith. Even the unfortunate Andrea Doria of the right
flank, whose courage has been questioned, betrayed no timidity of faith.
His flagship had in its cabin a large painted copy of "Our Lady of
Guadalupe", which had been touched to the original self-portrait in
Mexico, and the admiral with his crew openly revered it. To be sure, they
more profoundly revered the hoisted standard under which they sailed—the
Holy Cross.
Another item of interest, a marvel of
communication, adds to the supernatural quality of the triumph. The
capitals of Europe, then without benefit of telephones or even railroads
to hurry the news to them, did not learn the outcome of the battle for a
week or more, that is, all of them but one; in Rome on the day itself, at
about four in the afternoon, after the galley of Grand Admiral Ali Pasha
had been captured and panic spread from his squadron to the rest of the
fleet, Pope Pius knew of it. He had been looking out a window in his
Vatican quarters into the sky, and whether he saw there an inscription
announcing the victory or the actual scene of action televised on the
firmament, or for that matter enjoyed a mere intuition, remained his
secret to the grave. But of his immediate awareness of it, aside from how
he knew, he did speak. Turning from the window and back to the executive
meeting he had interrupted, he dismissed it with the words: "This is no
time for business. Go and thank God. Our fleet has just won the
victory." The papal treasurer, Bartolomeo Busotti, who was there reports
the incident.
His Holiness spoke with the unsurprised joy of
one who had been certain of victory and only uncertain of the time of its
occurrence. "There is no doubt," the historian Pastor concludes from the
documentary evidence at hand, "that Pius V had long foreseen the victory
of Lepanto." When he summoned Don John to the Vatican and gave him a
special crucifix to carry into the battle, he also gave the
commander-in-chief the assurance he would not fail. In the event, with
cross in hand, and that assurance in mind, an assurance he felt strongly
in his heart after his prayer to Mary, the genius of Lepanto rallied his
fiercely bombarded squadrons through the long crisis to a devastating
triumph. He would not give up. He had been assured. He counted on an
assistance not of this world. St. Peter Canisius tells it all in his
sermon at Innsbruck, during an overcrowded liturgical service of
thanksgiving. Honor was paid not so much to the heroic warriors of
Lepanto as to the Madonna of their prayers.
The saint in the Vatican, better than they,
knew to whom the credit belonged. Nor did Pope Pius keep the joy of his
knowledge to himself. He expressed it in a stirring proclamation,
establishing the date as henceforth the feast of Our Lady of Victory.
That Pope Gregory XIII afterwards changed its name to that of the Most
Holy Rosary subtracts nothing, but merely focuses attention on the
time-honored means through which the mother of divine grace would have us
secure her aid.
Her aid again made history on September 12,
1683, when at the walls of Vienna another ominous threat was turned back
after two solid months of siege. The smaller allied forces had as their
commander the devout King of Poland, John Robieski. At Czestochowa he had
invoked the patroness of the shrine. Now on his way to the battle front
he stopped at Passau to visit another of her shrines, that of Mary, Help
of Christians. In point of fact, during those two months of suspense,
pilgrimages from all over Europe would climb the hill to the shrine. Day
after day Emperor Leopold I would himself be there on his knees. None of
them prayed the rosary in vain. With drastic suddenness the victory
came. And they understood who sent it. The Holy See created the feast of
the Holy Name of Mary in acknowledgement.
Still again on August 5, 1716, devotion to the
rosary saved a divided Europe from yet another Ottoman attempt at
conquest. Confraternities in the Catholic nations duplicated the crusade
of a previous age to achieve at Belgrade what the earlier generation had
achieved at Lepanto. In the Eternal City, to quote a phrase from the
Roman Breviary, "almost at the very moment of battle" large units of the
crusaders spread out in all directions as they recited aloud the rosary.
The enormous Basilica of St. Mary Major, whose titular feast of Our Lady
of the Snows it was, could not hold the crowds who sought entrance that
day. By sundown the prayers were answered, although it would take time
for the news from Belgrade to circulate. Pope Clement XI, upon receiving
it, said nothing the faithful did not know when he attributed the great
victory to Mary, Help of Christians.
The comparatively recent saint, who never tired
of explaining Mary's role as the mainstay of the Church in times of stress
and who even named his new congregation of nuns the Daughters of Mary.
Help of Christians, fittingly erected a basilica to her honor at Turin.
She had asked him for it. Coming from her, the request became to Don
Bosco an ambition to fulfill. He hired the finest architect he could
find, instructing him to carry out the exact designing which Mary had
herself suggested to her visions to the saint. It ought to be expected,
then, that atop the spacious dome of the finished building stands a
gigantic Madonna holding the majestic Child and in her other hand holding
the scepter of a queen. But the meaningful statue does not stand out
there alone.
The dome has to its right and left two smaller
cupolas, on each of which stands a bronze angel. One of the two carries a
banner with the inscription written large upon it: Lepanto 1571.
The angel would have us know, by this reminder of a single instance, that
Our Lady of Victory in many another crisis has saved the Church. "The
other angel," if I may quote from a book of mine, "holds a crown, reaching
it toward the statue on the dome. It is a fine gesture, a fine
idea—though not Don Bosco's. The architect had taken a liberty with the
plans. And the saint allowed it, cherishing so much as he did the
queenship of Mary. But what the visionary had really prescribed for the
second angel was again a dated banner to be held aloft. Its date was to
be, however, an incomplete one. It would read simply: 19—".
Signifying what? Obviously that the same
victorious Helper of Christians would have to do it once more: save the
Church from the overpowering evil forces of the twentieth century. Have
no fear, she will. She cannot fail. The enmity between Satan and the
Woman of Genesis must end in his defeat, not hers, according to the
inerrable text. "In the end," she has herself said at Fatima, "my
immaculate heart will triumph."
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