Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Pope Francis’ prayerful greeting at yesterday’s prayer breakfast is being drowned out by a national outcry against President Barack Obama for using inaccurate historical accounts of the Inquisition and the Crusades in an attempt to put Christian violence in the name of religion on the same footing as the atrocities being committed by Islamic extremists such as ISIS and al Qaeda.

Vatican Radio is reporting that Pope Francis sent a message to the annual National Prayer Breakfast which was held in Washington DC yesterday and attended by President Obama, the Dalai Lama, lawmakers from all political parties, and thousands of guests.

“Dear friends, I send prayerful good wishes for you, for the fruitfulness of your work,” he said in the portion of the message that was read aloud. “I ask you to pray for me, and to join me in praying for our brothers and sisters throughout the world who experience persecution and death for their faith. Upon you, your families, and those whom you serve, I cordially invoke God’s blessings of wisdom, joy, and peace.”

The full contents of the text was read at the lunch portion of the event.

Meanwhile, the president gave a speech in which he drew a moral equivalent between the horrendous violence of the terrorist group, IS, with alleged acts of violence committed by Christians during the Crusades and the Inquisition.

“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

The comments, which are inaccurate, caused an instant backlash.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League issued a scathing rebuttal to the speech in which explains that “The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen of the Middle Ages.”

He cites the Princeton scholar and Islamic expert Bernard Lewis who said that “The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war—to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”

According to St. Louis University and Crusade scholar Thomas Madden, “All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars.”

Donohue asks: “How many ISIS atrocities, Mr. President, have met the criteria of just wars? The ones where they buried people alive, stoned children, raped women, and crucified men? Moreover, according to Henry Kamen, the leading authority on the Inquisition, a total of 1,394 people were killed during the Inquisition. Today, Muslim madmen kill more than that in a few months.”

The other “fable” which was perpetrated in the speech concerns the Inquisition. What most people don’t know is that the Catholic Church had almost nothing to do with this event.

“The Church saw heretics as lost sheep who needed to be brought back into the fold,” Donohue explains. “By contrast, secular authorities saw heresy as treason; anyone who questioned royal authority, or who challenged the idea that kingship was God-given, was guilty of a capital offense. It was they—not the Church—who burned the heretics. Indeed, secular authorities blasted the Church for its weak role in the Inquisition.”

Donohue is demanding an apology to Christians for this insulting comparison, and he’s not the only one.

An op-ed appearing in Investors.com slammed the president for his shocking comments.

“The remarks aren’t merely insulting. They betray a deep ignorance of Western Judeo-Christian culture and its history,” the op-ed reads. “ . . . (F)ar from being about conquest, the Crusades were a counter-reaction to the Muslim jihad that swept Christian lands in the Mideast, North Africa, Spain and Balkans. Nothing less than Western civilization was at stake. Not much has changed today.”

The article goes on to site statistics from Open Doors USA’s World Watch List for 2015 which reveal that approximately 100 million Christians are being persecuted around the world today, making them the most persecuted religious group, with Islamic extremism being the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the Watch List.

The issue also took aim at the president’s Jim Crow comments, saying that neither slavery nor Jim Crow laws were “justified” by the U.S. Christian mainstream.

“Indeed, as history shows, Christians were the driving force behind the anti-slavery movement in the U.S.,” the op-ed states, then points out: “ But slavery is still found in the Muslim Mideast and Africa.”

Not surprisingly, all of the major mainstream news networks – ABC, NBC and CBS – ignored the remarks and the subsequent backlash in their scant reporting of the event.

Had they behaved like journalists, they could have used the occasion to not only inform the public about news they have a right to hear, but could have cleared up much misinformation about the Crusades, the Inquisition and Christian participation in slavery. They might also have drawn much-needed attention to the shocking extent of Christian persecution taking place in the world today.

Instead, they missed an opportunity and opted to play politics instead which did little more than allow the president’s cringe-worthy remarks to stand uncorrected.

But this isn’t the only mark that was missed yesterday. As the op-ed states, if the comments were meant to appease the terrorists, they did nothing of the kind. Instead, our enemies were encouraged.

“As such, the comments were not merely wrong, they were also dangerous.”

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