I Am Giovanni, once of Capistrano. I’ve been called Saint John since then, but I did not feel like one in the dust of Perugia, nor in the stink of the camp at Belgrade.

I speak from the far side of death, where time is no longer a steady journey but a window to look back. I will tell you what I was and what I would say if I still had a voice in the world.

I was born on the feast of Saint John the Baptist, in the year of Our Lord 1386, in a small town in the Abruzzi, under the shadow of mountains that keep their own counsel. My father was a foreign knight, German, who had taken root in our stone country. He died while I was still a boy. My mother saw to it that I learned Latin and the law. She wanted a son who would not be broken by the world. I became what she hoped: a man of the courts. At Perugia I studied both civil and canon law. I judged. I governed. I wore the gravity of office like a second skin. I even entered into a contract of marriage, though never consummated. I had no knowledge of mysticism then. I became Governor. I believed order was a kind of holiness, and that a hard, clean sentence could save a city.

Then Perugia fell and despite my appeal to peace. The Malatesta took it and I was thrown into a prison that smelled of the mould of wet stone and held the broken will of defeat. There the law could not reach me. I had nothing and no-one left to judge but myself.

In that darkness I took a scrap of coarse cloth and cut it like a habit. I thought of Francis, who had stripped himself in the square and left all of his former life there. When I was later released,  I did not go back to the bench. I had the marriage annuled. That life had finished.

On the fourth of October, 1415, I entered the Observants, the strict Franciscans who wanted the Rule not as a decoration but as a wound one agrees to keep open. Bernardine of Siena became my brother and my fire. He taught me the Holy Name of Jesus. So that the Word who made the world, had a human throat and that throat could still be cried in the marketplace when the market had forgotten Him.

What took me in that direction was not a taste for war. It was the discovery that the soul is a jurisdiction higher than the law courts of Perugia.

I had loved justice as a craft, as a way of establishing right from wrong-doings. In the Order I learned that seeking justice without conversion is only a better-arranged ruin, like straightening pictures after an earthquake. I preached until my voice frayed. Crowds came because people were hungry for a God who was not just a rumour but alive and living in just words and good deeds.

I also hunted errors in others dictated as orders from the Pope against the workings of the Fraticelli and later the Hussites. I was an inquisitor and justice was harshly administered, I will not varnish over that. I believed a false gospel could kill a people more quickly and quietly than a sword. I still believe falsehood should not be buried in mercy or ignorance.

From here, I see through the thick smoke I did not see back then. In Poland and elsewhere, I told myself I was defending the Body of Christ. Some of what I defended was only the pride of the baptized. That is a regret I carry without self-pity. A preacher is responsible for the sacred fire he blesses upon others.

The Ottomans were another matter in my mind, and I will not pretend I thought of them as neighbours with a different calendar and map of the world. I saw a conquering host that had taken the City of Constantine in 1453 as the second Rome and was coming up the Danube as if Christendom had unlocked all its doors along its journey.

They were not “a movement of people.” They were an empire with artillery, janissaries, and a law that made the Cross a tolerated inferiority when it was not ruined entirely. I did not hate every Turk as individual men. I hated the entire project: an agenda seeking to diminuish the Christian way of life, its altars, its bells, its right to raise children in the Name of Christ, to be made subject, taxed, thinned out, and ultimately outlawed, buried and forgotten.

Pope Callixtus sent me to preach the cross. I took it at Buda. I gathered peasants and townsmen who had never seen a proper siege. Hunyadi had the soldiers. I rallied the cry.

At Belgrade in July of 1456, I saw the river blocked, the walls eaten away by cannon. I saw the poorly armed arrive in numbers because they were told that Jesus was not a private comfort but a King that needed fighting for. We broke the blockade. We held the breaches. We struck the camp. They withdrew in the night. People later called it a miracle and called me the Soldier Priest. But I was a tired friar holding aloft a high standard.

Hunyadi died in August. The plague walked through the streets and the villas alike. I died at Ilok on the twenty-third of October, saying the Holy Name I had shouted in the field. I was not sorry to lay the body down. I was sorry for all the men who would never return to see the homes of their childhood.

From this side of Life beyond Death, I have seen more centuries than I was given years. I have seen the Order I loved grow fat on what it took and grow thin again from what was taken from it. I have seen nations that called themselves Christian forget how to have children and how to teach them what the Word means. I have seen men who do not stand and fight against those who push other faiths upon them when they have no faith of their own to defend. They would happily sell the cross in exchange for 13 pieces of silver without thought for future generations.

I have seen the children of the Crescent live among you not as a besieging army, but as entire families, laborers, believers, and also as factions that do not accept the older laws of Europe as their final resting place. It is no longer 1456. Do not play-act my war and call it a holy crusade. Crusaders are not ushered in through the gates freely by city governors. Do not confuse a siege with a peaceful migration, you will commit new sins against the church and call them blessings of love and compassion.

Yet do not lie in the other direction either. I have watched indifference do what no sultan could finish: it has undone the Christian household. A faith that will not be handed to sons and daughters is a faith already half-surrendered. A people that will not defend the public shape of its own life, its speech, its worship, its law of marriage, its right to say that Christ is Lord without apology or shame, should not be surprised when another people, more certain of their God and more willing to be numerous, fill the vacant space that allows them to easily settle within. That is not a mystery of heaven. It is husbandry which is the Law of the Jungle in your terms.

What should be done about the movements of people? I am a holy man, not your minister of borders. But I can see that not all movement is the same mercy.

Receive the stranger who comes in peace as Francis would have: food, justice, the open church door, the invitation to the font if he will hear it. Do not baptize with a sword. I have seen what comes of that, and the Judge is not mocked.

But do not dissolve your way of life to prove you are kind. A city that cannot tell which are guests from heirs will not remain the city it was for long.

Numbers are not nothing when they multiply as opposition to the way of life.

A community may say: we will share bread; but we will not change the altar’s meaning or the court’s word of law to suit our guests. If a doctrine arrives that makes apostasy a crime in the heart even where your statutes forbid it, you are not obliged to accept that and call it diversity. You are obliged to protect the convert, the critic, and the child.

Have families and teach the next generation the Name. If your religion is only a memory in a museum, do not blame the mosque for living in the streets. The first duty is not to rally others to your cause and manage others. It is to become again a people who believe enough to beget and to catechize (a call for a community to regain a deep, active faith that drives them to have children and pass on their religious beliefs to the next generation).

Punish crime to the Law without regard to origin or race, and do not excuse or dismiss it for fear of names. Mercy that dismisses the wounds will become toxic to many and spread fatigue in others.

As for the Ottomans of my day, I would still have stood on that wall and cried the name of Jesus over the Sava. I would also, if I could walk backward into Poland, unsay the sentences that made a scapegoat of a people who were not Mehmed’s army. Heaven is not a faction. It provides a terrible clarity. From here I see every soul I moved toward God and every soul I shoved toward despair. Both are mine to own.

You who live: do not wait for a holy man of seventy years to rally a peasant gathering in the name of someone who many don’t believe in and won’t march under that banner. That age is over. Your battle, if you still want to use the word, is slower and less picturesque. It is whether you will be a people with a memory of the past and a future of tradition or only an open market with influenced opinions. Keep the poor. Keep the law. Keep the Name. And when you speak of movements on the earth, speak as united men who know that lands are inherited, faiths are taught, and no indifference, division or argument has ever held a frontier for long.

I was Giovanni. I was wrong in heat and right in fear and small in the end, like all of you. The window closes. The Name remains.

Speak out against injustice.

Keep the Faith and do what’s right.

Leave what’s left or lose the fight.