Saint Louis and Our Time
Original Publication: Novedades — Sunday Supplement, November 7, 1948.
Author: LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES.
Topics: Faith and Religious Life; History and the Hispanic World; Politics and Society.
By LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES
History, the teacher of life—as the ancient writer called it—never loses the relevance of its lessons. We are pleased now to recall one of them in the figure, familiar—though less so than he deserves—of that outstanding exemplar of the Middle Ages, the king of France: Louis IX, the Saint; a man of vigor whose heroic practice of every virtue led the Church to raise him to the honors of the altar.
In him, God found the most faithful servant; Christendom, the most intrepid champion; the French people, the most loving father.
His ascetic life amid the splendor of the throne has something of the magnificent, manly religious spirit of the Hispanic world. An inheritance, no doubt, from his exemplary Spanish mother, Doña Blanca of Castile, who would rather have seen her son dead than known him guilty of mortal sin.
His leadership of the last two crusades against Islam reveals him as a mirror of Christian chivalry. In this he gave his own age a lesson that ours can and should take to heart, and in which lies precisely the enduring relevance of his stature as a wise statesman: to avert wars among Christians and turn his sword and courage against the enemies of Europe and of our civilization. Thus, what we would today call his foreign policy performed a most valuable work of reconciliation, rendering inestimable service to European peace. He mediated, for example, in the disputes then raging between the Pope and the Emperor, and between the English Crown and the lords of that kingdom. He also succeeded in establishing sound peace with that same state and with Aragon. These—the most important—and the other acts of his foreign policy always followed the same paths: not pacifist—a misleading and undesirable term—but peacemaking.
For, as a Christian, he applied his virtue of charity to the momentous task of securing peace among peoples united—and united to this day—as branches of the same parent culture. For this achievement alone, Saint Louis deserves the gratitude of our contemporaries, and commemoration in bronze and marble, and above all in the gold of present deeds that imitate his admirable ones, undertaken by a world organization sincerely determined to reclaim the great blessing of peace; seeking for it moral guarantees before material ones. Louis could be a peacemaker because he was known to be just, virtuous, and aflame with charity.
No less exemplary and instructive for our own time than his international policy is his domestic policy. That monarch stands as an extraordinary model for rulers, with his great zeal for the prerogatives of his authority and his great detachment from whatever might concern him personally alone. His government, which accomplished good through justice and love of the people, gives him an eminent claim to be proclaimed a champion of the freedom and advancement of the humble, whom he always treated with greater solicitude than the powerful. The historic oak of Vincennes, in whose shade anyone could seek refuge, and beneath which he delivered decisions to subjects of every rank and fortune, joining the justice of the judge to the equity of the praetor and the tenderness of the father, has passed into history as a shining symbol of genuine freedom.
Yet that gentle and holy king—and precisely because he was such—was as far as one can imagine from the professional pacifists we suffer today. One of his contemporaries said of him: “Never did I see so handsome a man in arms; his head rose above those of all his men,” in battle. And we retain from him a golden saying whose neglect, in our own years, has brought many disasters upon the cause of Good: “The layman, when he hears the Christian faith spoken ill of, should defend it in no other way than with the sword, with which he should strike into the belly as far as it will go.”
Priceless words, reminding those who compromise with the powers of evil of their true duty in the bitter contest of forces we are now witnessing, both nationally and throughout the world.
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