I am ashamed to say I have only just locked on to the full fortunate happenstance of your original posted link a full year on, in that it asks if we should travel or meet in Seborga. I would almost certainly refuse to reply in your shoes, based on the utter discourtesy of the time lag alone, however I can merely grovel and beg you not to. You have at the very least contributed to our learning curve, or are we curving learning toward a better future for humankind, I am torn between the two horses, not quite gravely gruesome as the fate of St. Hippolytus, I hasten to add.
The major impact is that I suddenly realise that I have been to Seborga in the dim distant past, thus "Hai mai incontrato a SEBORGA compagno?" This is not my inept effort to strike up a travelogue, merely registering the fact that it is a place of interest in the scheme of things, especially its patron saint.
Geographically speaking it is a small town in the region of Liguria in northwest Italy, close to the French border. Intriguingly it resides in and is administered by the commune of Imperia, which when translated can have the following meanings:- supreme power; domain of control; right to enforce the law and so on.
Seborga has always protested its absorption under the unification of Italy and still reserves the right to independence, a rising rallying call these days in Europe at least. Perhaps residing under the titular yoke of Imperia has something to do with maintaining that mutineering spirit.
Anyway, returning to its erstwhile civic religious celebrity, Saint Bernard, who is the subject of a dedicated festival held in Seborga annually on August 20th. Bernard was actually a French Abbott, arbitrarily drawn Franco/Italian borders, further muddied by soldier politicians are undoubtedly to blame for his displacement, as Seborga is now firmly twinned with the French city of L’Escarene. Forgive me for I digress to territorial injustices, more importantly Bernard was the primary builder of the reforming Cistercian Order.
His main achievement,although I am not sure he relished the mantle, was the fact that following the Christian defeat at the siege of Edessa, the historic name of the modern city of Sanliurfa in South East Turkey, he was appointed by the Pope to preach the second Crusade. Preach he did with gusto to a massive crowd in a field in Vezelay, France, alongside King Louis. Indeed to such effect that when Bernard had finished his fiery address the crowd enlisted en masse; new recruits to the cause were supposedly so numerous that they ran out of cloth with which to make the defining crosses sewn to their clothes, at which point Bernard is said to have donated his own outer garments to be cut up to make more.
His recorded oratory went as follows: "O ye who listen to me! Hasten to appease the anger of heaven, but no longer implore its goodness by vain complaints. Clothe yourselves in sackcloth, but also cover yourselves with your impenetrable bucklers. The din of arms, the danger, the labours, the fatigues of war, are the penances that God now imposes upon you. Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance."
We hear similar rhetoric from the reverse source, clamouring for the reestablishment of the Caliphate as I write. Have we progressed beyond the saeculum obscurum as far as we think? Patently not.
The crusade ultimately failed miserably to save the Kingdom of Jerusalem and any other Crusader states scattered across Mesopotamia, with Bernard’s depression was compounded by the fact that he was saddled with the total responsibility for the abject failure of the second wave of crusaders, which he inspired to take up arms at the request of the then pontiff in the first place. His regrets were no doubt many.
Nevertheless, Bernard who died at age 63 having spent 40 years spent serving in the cloister, became the first Cistercian placed on the calendar of saints, and was canonised by Pope Alexander III on January the 18th 1174.
Despite all, over his lifetime he enjoyed the patronage of a broad cross section of society ranging from bee keepers and candle makers through Gibraltar, the Spanish Port City of Algeciras, Germany’s Speyer Cathedral and Kings College, Cambridge in Britain to the Knights Templar. I guess that like the 973-eht-namuh-973 community, Bernard felt strongly in his heart of hearts that he was trying to make the world a better place, and believed that right was on his side. Yet then as now, it all came down to a cocktail of territory, power and money not merely the protection of holy places, naturally accompanied by the ubiquitous mountain range of dead bodies and flood of refugees.
So not much has changed in 950 years, well we have to try harder as a group to make it so, the message is "We Are the Change!"