Bravo!

While instructing Clovis in the Faith, Saint Remigius read the passion of Our Lord to Clovis.  Clovis was deeply moved and finally got up, hefted his battle-axe, his franciscus, and shouted, “O, if only my brave Franks and I had been there we would have avenged the insults to our God!”

The spirit of the Crusades lives:

Police are investigating an incident in Edmonton, Canada, after a posse of elderly women beat back a priest’s attacker with their walking canes.

It was after evening Mass at Our Lady Queen of Poland parish on March 13, and Father Marcin Mironiuk was outside saying goodbye to parishioners when a young man, roughly 25 years old, approached the priest.

Fr. Mironiuk, who did not recognize the man, reportedly asked him if he spoke Polish. The man said no and reportedly rushed the priest, according to authorities.

Lorraine Turchansky, a spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton, told Global News Canada that the man threw the priest to the ground and started choking him with his hands when the elderly women who were also leaving Mass came to his defense.

“They were quite perturbed by this and shocked, really,” Turchansky said.

“They were older women so they’re not the kind of people who would whip out a cellphone and take a video or call 911. They did what they could and they had canes. They started striking the guy with their canes.”

When the women tried to pull the stranger off the priest, he fled the scene, Turchansky told Global News.

Go here to read the rest.  As I was reading this story, the spunk of the elderly female champions of the Church Militant brought to mind this sequence from the poem Lepanto by Chesterton:

We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

God bless you old women.  Your courage in defense of a priest brought a smile to my lips and a glow to my heart.