A Christian Knight’s Role in the Evangelization of Culture

“The Crusaders, with whom we associate the first Christendom – and who in fact represent one of its greatest failures – made the mistake of confusing and interior and spiritual struggle with an earthly and political one. The most important struggle is within. This suggests a way in which the ideal (if not the historical example) of medieval chivalry remains valid even today.”

British Catholic theologian, Stratford Caldecott, continues his exegesis of the evangelization of culture in his work, Not as the World Gives: the Way of Creative Justice, by quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar who felt that the West was built on the spirit of chivalry: ‘Francis was a knight of Christ, as was Ignatius in turn while Newman’s refinement resists every temptation to take things easy. Knighthood changes its form, but it does not change its soul…The glorification of the body of knights is no backward looking romanticism, no ancien régime that turns its face aside from the march of time, but the only effective equipment with which the Christian can meet the present day.’ This body of knights, he says, ‘is the fellowship under obligation to the King of Kings,’ in which each strives for an inner peace, a personal transformation and then take that peace out to the world through his interactions with others; for ‘how is the world to be healed, how are the peoples to be reconciled, if not through such a new body of knights which is nothing other than carrying out the will of Jesus Christ, here and now, in this time?’
Indeed! Within each of us there is a potent Christian knight who must steady his will and perfect his relationship with Christ if he is to transform the culture that pivots on even his smallest strokes.