Ave Maria!

This blog is an on-line meeting place for The Knights of Lepanto, The Other Marys, and anyone else who is interested in discussing the topic of chivalry and its renewal in a Catholic context.

Our premise is that this renewal is extraordinarily important for the restoration of moral and cultural common sense. Men need to be men and women need to be women. Marriage, family and society at large depend on it.

Furthermore, it is our position this common sense is learned nowhere better than at the feet of the King and Queen. The ideals and manners of the chivalrous tradition are fundamentally rooted in Catholic faith, in the sacrificial love of Christ for His Mother, and Her compassionate and obedient love for Him.

The excesses and defects of medieval courtly love obscured the chaste ideal of mutual honor and respect between men and women. Dan Brown style goddess worship is courtly love’s modern revival. Completely absent from this neopagan redux of chivalrous customs is the acknowledgment of how love for Mary inspired the beauty of Western culture and the ideal relationship between men and women.

Mary is the “glorious spring of purity and virginity, the gentle and glorious Virgin (Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry, c. 1352) and the “greatest force the Western world had ever felt” (Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 1911). May Mary Victrix lead the way toward a renewal of true chivalry, Marian Chivalry.