The Knights of Malta
Sire, H. J. A.
(D-Ore.) lifts hers from the first issue of Ms. magazine. "Oh my God, laundry! Are we supposed to do that? You mean that pile in the corner of the bedroom? It certainly would be nice to have a...
...That's all there is to it...
...Famous members such as Peter Grace, Alexander Haig, William Simon, and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...is not only a nice idea but a principle of action, Members of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St...
...The Order's first military activities were a kind of preventative medicine, guarding pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem from the Levantine coast...
...The American Spectator Subscriber Service P.O...
...The soldierly vocation was not merely compatible with the curative, it followed naturally from it...
...The extensive descriptions of fortifications, accompanied by diagrams and photographs, will be rougher going for all except aficionados of military engineering, who won't have to look up "ravelin," "barbican," or "talus...
...Distinctions of rank will last until the Second Coming...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...Sire urges caution...
...She caved so quickly that something else must have been said that she's not telling...
...What would it take...
...Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash...
...Sustained self-sacrifice is unimaginable without devotion to God, love for humanity per se being a notoriously inconstant passion...
...these members raise most of the money for charity...
...Lynn Woolsey analyzes the feminine penchant for detail: "Men are more broad-brushed, so they can go into these committee meetings and maybe they just soak it up, and they get it or it doesn't matter that they're just swishing through...
...Leslie Byrne (D-Va...
...at Lourdes: Dames in caped nurse's uniforms emblazoned with the eight-pointed cross, Knights in plain dark suits, thousands of them wheeling around the ill to Mass and prayer...
...That the Knights, like the crusaders, often did well by doing good—e.g., their war on the Barbary corsairs involved the licensing of privateers, lOr so goes the official story...
...Association with the rich and powerful can draw the wrong sort of attention and the wrong sort of people: witness the Italian financier, a Knight of Magistral Grace, implicated in both the P2 Lodge and Banco Ambrosiano scandals of the 1980s...
...shares with MMM her thoughts on the connection between team sports and the uses of power: "Men, as little boys, get it woven into their very fabric...
...and though no church has a monopoly on solicitude for the needy, the Knight's sense of duty is quintessentially Christian...
...And from early on, official writings describe the Order's charitable work in chivalric terms: as service to "our lords the poor" or "our lords the sick...
...For ye have the poor always with you"—and the un-poor, too...
...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...All she says is that when the ayes reached 217 of the 218 needed for passage, Clinton, his voice sounding "drained and tired," phoned her and asked simply, "What would it take, Marjorie...
...Crusade" is one of those religious terms—like "holocaust" or "epiphany"—that has been swamped by new, secular denotations...
...pilgrims to the Holy Land...
...Without your vote, I can't win...
...John were not monks who fought but soldiers who took vows...
...It certainly would be nice to have a wife...
...There also was supposed to be a postscript, but evidently it wasn't ready in time for inclusion in the reviewer's reading copy—and is missing from the hardbound copy as well...
...Liberals may hint at it, when invoking Roosevelts or Kennedys, but they never speak the words—perhaps because everyone knows by now that when politicians acquire noblesse, it's taxpayers who take on the oblige...
...In that case, why not give it all back...
...When the Knights ritually condescended to feed their patients in the hospital at Malta, they served aristocrats off of silver, the others off of pewter...
...In its stultifying central section, which treats the Order's European divisions country by country, one encounters a somewhat more exotic and better dressed cousin of The History of the Minneapolis University Club...
...This lowest rank now comprises a majority of the members in many National Associations, especially outside of Europe...
...The crusaders believed that they were serving God by defending the true Faith...
...Sire Yale University Press /305 pages / $45 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA The American Spectator June 1994 67 for that...
...But this is because we have forgotten the religious inspiration they had in common...
...Sire's book, rather, belongs on the coffee table of every middle-aged Knight...
...She says she couldn't live with herself if she "let him go down in flames, let him be cut off at the knees...
...This is the farthest thing from egalitarianism...
...It may be that for once in her life, HRC is mad at a woman who played hard to get with Bill...
...Along with accounts of intrigue in papal and royal courts, the most absorbing passages here are tales of battle...
...are mere Knights of Magistral Grace, "whose nobility consists only in their knighthood itself...
...The left, as ever, considers it a charade to distract the oppressed from fundamental inequities in society...
...Are stock holdings, vote counts, and LSAT scores truly preferable criteria for the assignment of society's highest esteem...
...The question is what the most serious distinctions will be based on...
...The entire rest of our agenda depends on getting this behind us...
...The text on the other hand is merely solid, and will prove an ordeal for even the most devoted readers...
...T he Knights of Malta is not destined for the success of Caoursin's fifteenth-century history, whose romantic style and charming engravings (a few of them reproduced here) lured a generation of aristocratic youth to the Order...
...In an age of universal tolerance and pervasive boredom, something like a risque thrill can be produced by contradicting the notion that all men are created equal...
...The Knight as warrior, like so much else of the pre-modern world, was a casualty of the French Revolution...
...Maybe it's because of their speaking style...
...Morris, Illinois 61054 (Please attach address label here...
...In 1798 Napoleon evicted the Order from Malta, its last sovereign territory, and afterwards anything but peaceable activity was unfeasible.' The Order now enjoys diplomatic recognition from more than sixty countries, a courtesy that facilitates relief work...
...Nevertheless, to those who would turn the Knights entirely into an order of merit, H.J.A...
...Neoconservatives find the implicit social and ethnic elitism repugnant...
...Thus the story of Prince Zizim, handed over by his rival sibling the Turkish Sultan and maintained by the Knights in gilded captivity, rates less attention than the administrative history of a French convent...
...laments: "Women often aren't taken very seriously...
...The Knights of St...
...is: "So the last shall be first, and the first last...
...Also missing from the final copy is the "Interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton" advertised on the book jacket...
...Men have never found it hard to reconcile profit with principle...
...There are still at least 10,000 people for whom n.o...
...One wonders if there weren't at least a few Knights yearning to get back into the game...
...Each May they sponsor a virtual Woodstock of n.o...
...Knights of Justice, the only ones eligible to sit on the Sovereign Council, must show sixteen quarters of nobility...
...Today, fighting and healing seem incongruous missions, even incompatible ones...
...There's something poignant about the photographs of medieval churches and ruined castles, at once massively solid and soaringly graceful...
...A system of privilege based on lineage and regulated by the Church is surely invidious and oppressive to many...
...But that's okay...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...Nowadays the Knights of Malta bring relief to the distressed everywhere from the Amazon to Vietnam...
...They dedicated their craft to God just as the masons did who built the medieval cathedrals...
...71 r 1 MOVING...
...Chivalry, Sire reminds us, meant bearing arms...
...That is just what she got, along with a lot of flak from her constituents...
...TAS Address Changes Made Easy...
...Their intransigence at Malta nearly a century later earned the gratitude and admiration of all Christendom...
...W e're puzzled by the idea of a Military Hospitaller Order for the same reason that we are unable to appreciate n.o.: we've forgotten its religious inspiration, too...
...A better formula for n.o...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...IMPORTANT Allow six weeks for address change...
...The right, with George Bush painfully fresh in mind, sees it as a fancy term for Republican me-too-ism...
...John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, have been caring for the poor and the sick since the eleventh century, when the Blessed Gerard founded a hospice for Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...When she demurred, he revved up his tone of exhausted self-pity and floored the guilt pedal...
...Yet what a club...
...In the mid-1980s there were oblique accusations of aid to the Nicaraguan contras...
...is not the virtue formulaically expressed as "giving something back," which suggests a bad conscience about what was taken away...
...Even in Sire's pedestrian telling, the Knights' great accomplishments, especially those on the battlefield, command our awe...
...II Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$35) 71 Payment enclosed CI Bill me later Name: Address City: (Please Print) 68 The American Spectator June 1994...
...It would really take an entitlements conference," she chirruped...
...But at least it affirms the importance of family, of continuity with the past and future, and of values that transcend the material world...
...They take their nobility as seriously as their obligations...
...it seeps into their inchoate bones...
...Of course, the Order's history is also marked by the perfidy of the pedigreed, but the aptly named Sire maintains that aristocracy is a unique source of "energy and esprit de corps...
...71 W ho takes noblesse oblige seriously anymore...
...This would be morally commendable if it did not stem from a literary failing: the author is in so much of a hurry to cover the entire history that he never dwells on any anecdote or circumstance long enough to engage the reader's imagination...
...The Knights of Malta provides a taste of such reactionary pleasure, but the hauteur is generally too high-minded THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA H.J.A...
...i.e., all their great-grandparents must have had coats of arms...
...It will be an ornament to that table, with State: Zip: ete of change: full-color reproductions of paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, and Pinturrichio...
...Nor, despite princely portraits, photographs of palaces, and descriptions of courtly splendor, does this book qualify as what Tom Wolfe calls "plutography...
...Box 657, Mt...
...And besides, the future of her children and all of America's children was at stake—the epilogue is entitled "Our Legacy to Our Children...
...I think my administration will grind to a halt without the passage of this budget...
...It was only natural that they would then seek to give their craft wider scope—eventually the entire Mediterranean...
...By holding off a Turkish siege of Rhodes in 1480, they thwarted the Sultan's plan to invade Italy...
...of whose spoils the Order enjoyed a share—does not argue against their sincerity...
...M MM's chapter on The Vote is disappointingly—and suspiciously—skimpy...
...Yep, maybe it is...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
