Further Holy Land Efforts

Gregory X, bishop of Rome, in 1274 at the second council of Lyon, continued to call for another crusade to recover the Holy Land:

Attempts were made to again fan the embers of the once fervid enthusiasm into a flame, but in vain. Gregory X, who was in the Holy Land at the time of his election to the papal chair, carried with him westward a passionate purpose to help the struggling Latin colonies in Palestine. Before leaving Acre, 1272, he preached from Ps. 137:5, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." His appeals, issued a day or two after his coronation, met with little response. The Council of Lyons, 1274, which he convened, had for its chief object the arrangements for a Crusade. Two years later Gregory died, and the enterprise was abandoned.
History of the Christian Church, by Philip Schaff, Volume V, Chapter 7, § 58

During the Crusades, the occasional prophetic voice rang out decrying the papal motives and methods driving them; but those voices did not find a hearing in the hearts of the people as did the promises of papal indulgences, and temporal rewards, for the brave and the bold. Though it became evident to all, after two hundred years of unremitting failures, that the military conquest of the Holy Land by crusading was not the means that God would bless, the popes did not relinquish their assumed mandate to recruit armies for the expanding of their dominions.

As the Crusades progressed, a voice was lifted here and there calling in question the religious propriety of such movements and their ultimate value. At the close of the twelfth century, the abbot Joachim complained that the popes were making them a pretext for their own aggrandizement, and upon the basis of Joshua 6:26; 1 Kings 16:24, he predicted a curse upon an attempt to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. "Let the popes," he said, "mourn over their own Jerusalem—that is, the universal Church not built with hands and purchased by divine blood, and not over the fallen Jerusalem." Humbert de Romanis, general of the Dominicans, in making out a list of matters to be handled at the Council of Lyons, 1274, felt obliged to refute no less than seven objections to the Crusades. They were such as these. It was contrary to the precepts of the New Testament to advance religion by the sword; Christians may defend themselves, but have no right to invade the lands of another; it is wrong to shed the blood of unbelievers and Saracens; and the disasters of the Crusades proved they were contrary to the will of God.
¶ Raymundus Lullus, after returning from his mission to North Africa, in 1308, declared "that the conquest of the Holy Land should be attempted in no other way than as Christ and the Apostles undertook to accomplish it—by prayers, tears, and the offering up of our own lives....
¶ The successors of Nicolas IV [bishop of Rome, 1288-1292], however, continued to cling to the idea of conquering the Holy Land by arms. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they made repeated appeals to the piety and chivalry of Western Europe, but these were voices as from another age. The deliverance of Palestine by the sword was a dead issue....
History of the Christian Church, by Philip Schaff, Volume V, Chapter 7, § 58

Search Papacy Uncovered