At the top of a grassy hill in St. Louis, Missouri, a bronze apotheosis of the city’s patron sits erect on a giant steed, keeping watch over the city. Recently, this work of art, which has inspired St. Louisans for over a century, has come under scrutiny.
All over the world, beautiful, priceless monuments are now endangered by vandals who blindly follow the New World Order [1]. Almost any pretext will suffice to remove the figure of a person whose life did not conform to the chillingly bland mold of modern heroes. It comes as no surprise that Catholic saints have a high bounty on their heads. Catholics must vigilantly and zealously protect the statues, which honor not distant historical figures, but their own relatives in the Body of Christ. The bonds between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant are stronger than blood. When the New World Order, in its brazen anti-Catholic bigotry, wields its club at the monuments of our predecessors in the Faith, it attacks our living relatives.
The statue of a Catholic saint does not impose religious beliefs on citizens any more than a statue that embodies so-called “modern values.” Modernism is itself a religion — and a rigid, hypocritical one at that. Its disciples preach tolerance but practice anti-Catholic bigotry. The differences between Catholic monuments and Modernist monuments are many, but even at first glance, one can easily see that the former are almost always magnificent and irreplaceable works of art, while the latter are, to put it mildly, a bit hard on the eyes.
One never sees tourists snapping selfies near sculptures like this one.
To return to the subject of St. Louis, king of France, I would like to share a letter I received from a friend of mine who is a professor of Church history and well versed in medieval studies. He replies to my general questions about the controversial aspects of the life of Louis IX of France:
[Salutation]
So, here is what is going on here — and everywhere else these days. It’s moral imperialism. It is the opinion-setting class in our society virtue-shaming people of other cultures and other eras because they do not adhere to the standards of the opinion-setting class.
The class has a lot of baggage and should be ashamed to impose their morals on others. After all, this class ignores the slaughter of blacks in our major urban area (just yesterday three teens were shot in Saint Louis city within an hour or so, and there is no outcry). This class oversees the murder of 50 million unborn babies and thinks that that is the exercise of an inalienable right. This class has no problem with pornography on our televisions and in our movie theaters as long as these shows don’t have someone smoke a cigarette.
Michael Allen, an architectural historian at Washington University, is operating out of his lane. Comparing Saint Louis IX to Hitler is preposterous. Perhaps he should consider that he teaches at a university named after a U.S. president who owned slaves. Or he should virtue-shame the founder of his university, William Greenleaf Eliot, who was an abolitionist who owned a slave, Arthur Alexander. He only freed him three months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Eliot was not only a hypocrite, but also a religious bigot who tried to keep Catholic nuns from nursing the Civil War wounded when they were the only trained nurses in America at the time! Talk about virtue-shaming!
So, on to Saint Louis IX. He was not perfect; few saints are. However, Saint Louis exercised heroic virtue as a monarch. He was concerned for the poor, feeding 100 each day at his own expense. He established a hospital for the blind, a refuge for women seeking to escape from prostitution. Louis aided Robert of Sorbonne in establishing the theological school of the University of Paris. He sought to create a just society using the principle of applied Christian jurisprudence in the rough and tumble times of the Middle Ages. He was a patron of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The king did conduct two crusades. But let us not forget that Muslims had been raiding Italy, Southern France, and Spain for centuries. They continued to do so well into modern history. Saint Vincent de Paul was kidnapped and enslaved until his escape. One of the earliest wars the United States fought was against the Barbary “Pirates,” who weren’t really pirates but Muslim raiders.
His problem with the French Jews was real. His zeal for his Faith was such that he resented their continued resistance to conversion. He burned several cartloads of the Talmud. Another problem he had with the Jews, especially in some northern duchies, was that they defied the laws regarding usury. Louis IX was a man of his times. We have to recognize that.
[Signature]
The above summary only scratches the surface of the history of Louis IX and his times. Anyone who takes the time to study academically honest works on the Crusades; the Jewish presence in medieval Europe; and, in particular, the life of Louis IX, is sure to come away with a very different picture from the History Channel’s. Louis IX strove for sanctity not in a vacuum. He, like us, had to muddle through as best he could in the messiness of his times. Some may press the charge of anti-Semitism, but we know that Louis desired the conversion of Jews so their souls might be saved; this is love of neighbor. It bears noting that, in a letter to his son, Louis wrote this advice:
You should, with all your strength, shun everything which you believe to be displeasing to Him. And you ought especially to be resolved not to commit mortal sin, no matter what may happen and should permit all your limbs to be hewn off, and suffer every manner of torment, rather than fall knowingly into mortal sin. [2]
After reading this letter, one can hardly imagine that Louis was the ravenous proto-Hitler that the modern intelligentsia blithely make him out to be. It would seem that any laws he enacted regarding the Jews must, in his view, have been pleasing to God. It is only in keeping with the New World Order’s arrogance and willful ignorance of history that, now, it believes that it knows our saint better than we know him. It presumes that the simplistic analysis of its academic dilettantes can suddenly erase the factual evidence of the heroic virtue exhibited by Louis IX, to say nothing of the numerous miracles attributed to the saint. Make no mistake: the New World Order does not, and will never, know better than the millions of faithful Catholics of the past seven centuries who have loved and honored Louis IX, king of France.
In the tumult of this age, where the New World Order systematically levels remnants of Christian culture, we may find ourselves echoing the words of Tolkien’s Théoden: “The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?” [3]. Reckless hate spurs the New World Order to defame our saints, tear down our monuments, bar us from the sacraments, and lock us out of our own churches. How, indeed, will any tower stand? Perhaps St. Louis asked the same questions when he met with failure in two crusades. His letter to his son gives us an idea of how he would have met the misfortunes of this vale of tears:
If our Lord send you any adversity, whether illness or other … you should receive it in good patience and be thankful for it, for you ought to believe that He will cause everything to turn out for your good; and likewise you should think that you have well merited it, and more also, should He will it, because you have loved Him but little, and served Him but little, and have done many things contrary to His will. [2]
As usual, the Christian response is one of gratitude and humility. We may look upon the sorrows of our day the same way devout crusaders looked upon the sufferings of war — they are opportunities to atone for our sins and grow in merit before God. We may live to see better days, or the world may only grow darker, but whether the statues stand or fall, we will never cease to exclaim, “Deus vult!” I conclude with another apropos passage from Tolkien:
The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, started into speech. ‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’
The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.
‘They cannot conquer for ever!’ said Frodo. [3]
Sancte Ludovice, ora pro nobis.
[1] For an excellent description of the New World Order and the evil forces at work against the Church, see the letter of His Grace, Archbishop Viganò to President Trump posted here on LifeSiteNews: “Archbishop Viganò’s powerful letter to President Trump: Eternal struggle between good and evil playing out right now,” LifeSiteNews, June 6, 2020.
[2] “Letter of Saint-Louis IX, Roi et Confesseur, to His Son Philip III,” Christendom Restoration Society.
[3] JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954), 526–527, 687.
