What We Believe

Our knighthood Order is The Order of the Green Cross. As an emblem or symbol, the green cross in our Order represents the Celtic Christian movement begun by St. Patrick, the second Bishop of Ireland around 385 A.D. The Green Cross not only stands for the Christianization of Green Erin, as the Irish Christians referred to their beloved homeland, but also for the movement known as Green martyrdom. Thus we are historically as well as officially connected to a 1600 year tradition in terms of our rule of life, and a 2200 year old tradition dating back to the Maccabaeun Revolt in terms of our knighthood and code of chivalry (see What We Are).

The lethal persecution of Christians, known as the red martyrdom wasn’t always the outcome of the missionary outreaches of the early church. According to Thomas Cahill, who wrote the popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Ireland was unique in that Christianity took root there without the shedding of blood. No Irish martyrs emerged until the time of Elizabeth I. Cahill states that this lack of martyrdom disturbed the Irish, who feared that their faith was not genuine because it had not been tested like the faith of those who lived under the threat of red martyrdom. So, devout Irish Christians, under the leadership of St. Patrick, created a movement called the green martyrdom, whose rule of life was made up of self-imposed restraint from those things many Christians of the time took for granted, such as owning possessions, entertaining impurity in heart and mind, making idols out of friends and possessions, and generally leading an undisciplined, unexamined life. Their new order thus found a remedy in taking a vow of poverty and separation (from the “world”).

Green martyrs left behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society to live the life of a hermit, choosing to live in community on mountaintops or lonely islands around Britain. They saw this as a way of voluntarily suffering for Christ’s sake, and called this way of living The Way of the Cross. They were called pilgrims due to the fact that they preferred a life of wandering in the forests and mountains of Ireland, studying the Scriptures and communing with God in prayer. Many holy encounters took place as they set out on holy quests to be alone with God and follow the Spirit of God’s leading. Holy markers and shrines would indicate where special miracles and signs and wonders took place, and these became places pilgrims would travel to as a kind of holy quest. Just as Red Martyrdom was called the vow of obedience, Green martyrdom was called the vow of poverty, because these Irish pilgrims, or peregrines, determined to be ruled only by the law of love. Therefore, poverty to them meant generosity. They understood the vow of poverty as a commitment to renounce all personal ownership in anything, so that they might give some or all they had to others in need or want without being hindered by an emotional attachment or entitlement to the things they had. It was alright to have things, but not own things, for they believed that when a Christian owned something, it inevitably “owned” them as well and hindered them from serving God with their whole heart. The vow of poverty then, meant that they renounced all earthly possessions in order to be free from all worldly concerns to be able to pursue Christ with all their mind and strength. And the bonds of love and joy, and liberty of heart they experienced creates a longing in my heart every time I read of it.

The Order of the Green Cross then, is patterned after the model of St. Patrick’s Celtic Christian movement known as Green Martyrdom, and stands for separation from all that is worldly, occultic and sensuous; choosing the life of pilgrimage (wandering, journeying) as opposed to being so heavily invested in this world as to dull one’s effectiveness as a defender of the Christian faith and witness of the world to come; and being good stewards of God’s creation, respecting the land and the life of all living things.

Although we are a knighthood order, we are not to be associated with those secret societies and/or groups who use the imagery and language of knighthood and chivalry, but whose systems are based largely on occult mysteries which include Egyptian, Arabian, Canaanite and other forms of ancient or eclectic Pagan rites and practices.

Such groups as those associated with Free Masonry, such as the DeMolays, Job’s Daughters, Daughters of the Eastern Star, etc, and others (there are too many to name here) may have fine objectives (the Masons, for instance, state that the purpose of their organization is to make good men better), but mingle elements of Christianity, Paganism, and some of the darkest occult systems of ancient times (borrowing heavily from Egyptian, Canaanite, Babylonian and Arabian occult imagery and fertility rituals) so that Christ and Christianity become profaned and blasphemed. Secret societies such as the Free Masons and the Shriners, to name a few, are syncretistic, in that they mix Christianity with other pagan, occult-based belief systems. The Bible forbids both Jews and Christians to participate in such systems even if it costs them their lives.

We also realize to our sorrow and shame, that not all knighthood orders remained true to their godly calling and commitment to defend God and the king (or in our modern vocabulary, God and Country). Such knighthood orders as the Templars, started out as faithful defenders of the Christian faith, and protectors and guardians of Christian travelers making a pilgrimage to the holy land, only to later be exposed as a secret society of devil worshipping mercenaries. Indeed, when such high ideals as those espoused by true Christian knights are upheld, much good comes of it in the defending of Biblical Orthodoxy, strengthening of the faithful, purifying the Church, caring for the poor, widowed and fatherless, evangelizing the lost, and in bringing glory to God in Christ. But when an individual knight or an entire knighthood order chooses to break faith with its ideals, not only is the previous light extinguished, but darkness and evil on par with the lightness and good they once attained, brings all that was once championed and striven for into disrepute and corruption. Alas!

Nevertheless, misuse or abuse of a good thing is no reason for non-use, if correction might aright it altogether. The ideals of knighthood and chivalry were first developed in a family of faithful Jewish men during the time of 168-166 B.C. The Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes was determined to completely destroy all worship of the one true God. In his efforts to accomplish this, he cruelly tortured and slaughtered more than eighty thousand Jewish believers. It was his belief that such visible acts of extreme cruelty would discourage the Jews from following after their God. The mistake of Antiochus, however, was in his underestimation of the devotion of the majority of the Israelites to their God, and the enduring power of their faith. This underestimation would cost him dearly. Not long after he defiled the Temple, the first stirrings of a revolt surfaced in an unexpected part of the empire, led by a relatively unknown Jewish family. This would grow into a bloody struggle for Jewish independence which has come to be known in history as The Maccabaeun Revolt.

Future knighthood orders learned from the way Mattathias Maccabaeus organized his successful guerrilla warfare against Antiochus IV, and used his model. The Maccabaeun model not only fought to defend and protect the nation of Israel militarily, but also went to work cleansing the temple which was defiled by Antiochus IV, and having it consecrated again so that Jewish worship could continue. In this light they were defending the orthodoxy of their faith which was handed down by Moses and the prophets, making their warfare spiritual as well as political. Syncretism was as much their enemy as Syria was, and they fought both of these with equal passion. They demanded nothing less than Biblical behavior from those who fought with them, and so followed a code of conduct from which future chivalry would be based. From such a model, the ideals of modern knighthood orders should be established and upheld.

Our order is one of the few in existence today that has the endorsement not only of a church (our entire knighthood program is promoted and overseen by our church as part of it’s ministry), but also has the official endorsement and formal blessing of Episcopal Bishop John David Schofield, Anglican Bishop of the San Joaquin, with certificates and papers served therein. This was an important step for us in that through the Bishop, a marriage with historical knighthood rites was formally established, adding authenticity and historicity to our traditions. The Bishop is good friends with our own founder, Rev. Dr. Pete Bertolero, and was kind to grant us this blessing and his official endorsement even though we are not members of the Anglican Church, nor tied in any way with the Episcopal church in America or anywhere else. We are honored to have Jon David’s blessing for many reasons, but most especially, because he is a defender of Christian orthodoxy at a time when his denomination is growing ever more apostate, making him a hero of the faith, and a model of what a defender of the faith looks and acts like, even when there is personal cost and persecution involved. And so one of the things we are is an official, historic order of knights, upholding the historic ideals of Christian knights bound by a biblical code of chivalry, and by historical rites of knighthood (see Our Rule Of Life).

We knights of the Order of the Green Cross understand our Order in the light of the Maccabaeun model (168-166 B.C.). We see ourselves as keepers of the flame of orthodox, Biblical Christianity, and accept the exhortation of Jude, the brother of our Lord, who urged us – “ to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.” We are particularly grave when it comes to defending Biblical Christology, especially in light of the many blasphemous attacks against the person and work of Christ; and against the inspiration of the canon of the Bible, which has also come under increasingly hostile attacks in these times in which we live. Because we have many in our number who are ordained ministers, our order can be classified as both a secular order as well as a holy order of warrior priests and monks. By secular we do not mean “secular” in the way it is used in “secular humanism” or in a worldly sense which denies the existence of the transcendent and eternal (and thus is atheistic or agnostic).

When we speak of our order as a secular one, we are saying that we are called to be salt and light in this present evil age in which we live. We cannot escape the fact that we are in the world. We live in it, dwell in it. At times, Christians have used such good things as sacred orders, such as that of the green martyrs, as a way to escape or abandon the world. But Jesus taught us not to escape the secular, but to escape secularism. In other words, we must learn to be in the world, but not of the world; to embrace it without embracing worldliness.

In this regard, we are a profane order, in the sense which Martin Luther gave to the phrase. Luther was probably using the word for its shock value, playing with the literal Latin word which meant “outside the temple.” Luther was using the word tongue in cheek, to encourage the church to be salt and light in the world, and to the world. To Luther, a profane church is a church which takes the great commission seriously, by moving outside the temple and into the real battle field – the secular world in which we live.

Our mission has a two-fold objective: firstly, our calling is to raise up generations of strong, godly and mature Christian men who are committed to serving Christ and His church as protectors and defenders of God’s people and of Biblical truth. This aspect of our mission emphasizes the empowering of fathers to be involved in the training up of their sons and daughters, and thus passing on their legacy of faith to the third and fourth generation. Our order stresses the early training and maturing of our children in a Christian version of the Chivalric code and the way of green, white and red martyrdoms, beginning with young boys and girls (theirs is a female version of our order for young ladies) from the age of eight years old to adulthood and beyond. By incorporating the principles of Biblical chivalry and knighthood into a directional process, we provide the curriculum and philosophy to fathers, mentors and our younger participants that is aimed toward equipping them and empowering them to be the kind of men God intended them to be.

Secondly, our core value is to be salt and light - to live amongst the lost of this world, in the ungodly societies of men, as watchers and defenders of the true faith, keepers of the orthodox Christian confessions and creeds fought for in the first 4 centuries of the church, spreaders of the true Biblical message of the gospel of Christ, continuers of the redemptive and rescuing ministry of our reigning Lord, and sanctified patriots fighting to restore our nation to it’s Christian roots, the flower of which sprung from the faith of our founding fathers in the form of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. May the three in one and one in three, God the Father, Son – our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, help us stand and remain standing in the evil day, having our loins girt about with Biblical truth, our hearts protected with the righteousness of Christ, our minds protected by the knowledge of our salvation, our feet firmly planted in the gospel of Christ, standing united – shield to shield - in solidarity and unity of like-precious faith, skillfully wielding the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. Amen.

From the manuscript from the book by the founder and Bishop of our order, Rev. Dr. Peter Bertolero

The Bible gives stern and strident admonition for Christians to have absolutely nothing to do with occult belief systems and practices. It is called idolatry. Missiologists use the term syncretism, which means the attempt to reconcile, unite, merge or co-exist with different and opposing principles, parties, practices or belief systems. Read for yourself how clear and precise Biblical warnings are regarding syncretism in Deuteronomy 18:9-13; 12:29-32; Leviticus 18:1-4; 26-31; Josiah 24:14-15; 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1-2; 1 Corinthians 10:14-24; 1 Thessalonians 1:9; 1 John 5:21.

To read more about the fall of the Templars, get our pastor’s expose on Free Masonry, by calling The Fresno Christian Resource Center at 1-559-225-0489. Ask for Lynn.

From an article by Al Maxey, entitled, The Silent Centuries; The Maccabean Revolt (168-135 B.C.)