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Posted on 07/17/2002 7:18:34 AM PDT by Romulus
The martyrs of Compiègne are sixteen Carmelite nuns killed during the French Revolution.
Of this revolution today people especially rememeber those three big words on which everyone seems to agree: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It is still in discussion whether the triplet originates from Christianity or freemasonry; anyway it is known that at the beginning, the Revolution preferred to insist more on the doublet Liberty-Equality then on the word Fraternity, considered anyway too sentimental and too "Christian". As a matter of fact, the hardest fight was unleashed in the name of those two first "values", so the opposite manner with which enlightened and believers conceive "reason" emerged.
For so-called "enlightened reason", proclaiming that "men are free and equal in their rights" (1st article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789) means admitting nothing prior to this formulation, giving it no foundation beyond that very reason that produces and recognises it.
Only an indefinite and extrinsic reference to the "presence" and to the "omens" of the Supreme Being was maintained, but it disappeared in the Declarations of the following centuries. On the contrary, according to "reason enlightened by faith", men are free and equal in their rights because they all enjoy a first and inalienable dignity: to be all children of God, loved, created and saved by Him.
The boundless distance between the two points of view could be noticed by an opportune and deep reflection, but it is even more apparent when those two widely displayed rights of "Liberty and Equality" are concretely recognised, defended and applied. The history of our martyrs offers a "bright" example, for with every clarity it puts in evidence the different "light" of which reason makes use.
The famous Declaration of Rights of Man was issued on 26th August 1789; a few months later, the prohibition of sworn religious vows (in the name of individual freedom) came promptly, and the suppression of religious Orders, starting with the contemplative ones. The theorem was simple: no one can be free who locks himself in a convent and ties himself down with vows; if one does it, it means that he was forced. It's the task of Reason (and of a Nation) to give freedom back to him.
It was then that the Prioresses of three Carmelite monasteries, speaking for all the others, sent to the National Assembly a communication which reads:
"The most complete liberty governs our vows; the most perfect equality reigns in our houses; here we know neither the rich nor the noble. In the world people say that monasteries contain victims slowly consumed by regret, but we proclaim before God that if there is on Earth a true happiness, we are happy."
Those revolutionaries' view of vows and monasteries was one of reason "enlightened" by what they had read or heard from men of letters, actors, journalists and philosophers, giving life to morbid or romantic ideas, similar to those encountered today in some novels or melodramatic soap operas.
Thus the persecution began with the knightly and ridiculous zeal of a troop of officials, who appeared at the monasteries' doors to offer themselves as paladins and liberators. We are able to describe exactly what happened in the Compiègne monastery, where then were 16 professed nuns. There was also a young novice who at the last moment had been prevented taking her vows, by that very decree that "did not recognise any more religious vows or other enrolment against natural rights.
Then the officials came, violated the cloister and settled in the big chapter hall. Four guards were placed near the two doors. Other guards were set, one by each cell's door, to prevent the nuns from communicating among themselves and moreover from keeping contact with the Prioress; the other doors of the cloister were occupied as well.
Maintained as absolutely certain was the idea that otherwise the nuns would be subjugated and forced to lie by the presence of their Mother Superior (or some more despotic sister).
One by one the nuns were summoned, to each of whom the president "announced (literally!) that he was the bearer of freedom, inviting her to speak freely and declare if she wanted to leave the cloister and return to her family..." A secretary in the while was taking accurate note of the answers (thus their authenticity is granted by the "opposers").
This unlimited presumptuousness of knowing what freedom is and posing as welcome liberators is more enlightening than philosophical and theological debates, moreover if compared with the freedom experienced by those nuns who they expected to set free. The Prioress, called first, declared she "wanted to live and die in that holy house".
An old nun said that "she had been a nun for 36 years and she wished to have just as many more to consecrate to the Lord."
A nun said she had made herself a nun "with full pleasure and of her own free will" and that she was "firmly decided to keep her cloth, even at her own blood's cost". Another one explained that "there was no happiness so great as that of living as a Carmelite" and "her most burning wish was to live and die a Carmelite". Another one insisted that "If she had had one thousand lives, all of them she would consecrate to the status she had chosen and nothing could convince her to abandon the house where she lived and where she had found her happiness".
Another sister added that she "took advantage of that circumstance to renew her religious vows, and moreover she exploited the occasion to give the court officials a poem she had just composed about the topic of her vocation" (but they, turning away, left the sheet on the table with disgust).
Another more remarked that "if she could double the ties that bound her to God, she would make it with all her strength and immense joy".
The youngest professed, who had taken the vows during that year, noticed that "a well born bride remains with her groom, and thus nothing could induce her to part from her divine Spouse, Our Lord Jesus Christ".
Their answer was, saying it as simple as possible, that they wanted "to live and die in their monastery".
Many of them did surely not remember, or had never heard of it, but their answers were very similar to that given by the bishop St. Polycarp to the Roman prosecutor, in the first Christian centuries: "For eighty-six years I have being serving Christ, and He has never done wrong to me: how could I deny my king and my saviour?"
The nuns of Compiègne became martyrs when, not even realising it, began to use the language of martyrs, the language of one who, put to a definitive test, states with all his heart that "nothing could ever separate him from Christ".
And since the menace of death is approaching, this is the greatest possible witness, stating that Christ is part of the definition of one's self, of one's life, so that dying for Him is not a misfortune, but a gain.
In this life, one cannot speak the word "I" in a fuller and more definitive way than when giving oneself in the hands of those, who, for Christ's sake, wants to take one's life. For it is then that Jesus totally makes one with our fragile and fearful self, to sustain it and give it strength and joy.
The novice was not interrogated. Since she had not taken the vows, it was expected that sooner or later she would have to return to her home.
As a matter of fact, did come to take her back, but having heard her say that "nothing and no one could separate her from the communion with the Mother and Sisters of that monastery" they left stating that they "did not want to hear of her any more, neither receive her letters": thus acknowledging, in a paradoxical way, the girl's choice.
The text of the answers, both in the unanimity and in the characteristic traits, discloses the traits of the martyrs whose story we are narrating.
It is right to observe that, from the canonical point of view, it is improper to speak of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne. To tell the truth fourteen nuns were killed, two other victims were the nuns' lay maidservants, so loving that they wanted to share the same destiny of their nuns, thus sharing their passion and glory, as well. The reality is that after that "solemn profession" of martyrdom, we cannot make distinctions among them anymore: having made a choice for God, they are "sixteen Carmelite nuns".
We can also proudly add that in all the monasteries in France, counting more or less 1900 priests, nuns and monks, the apostasies were only five or six. Meanwhile, the National Assembly was giving traumatic evidence of of the inability of so-called "enlightened reason" to understand that "new fact" (even if centuries old) that is the Church. Words like Revelation, Tradition, Authority, Belonging were stubbornly painted as being inimical to Freedom.
Regardless of the cost, the nuns gave stubborn witness to the evidence:
one is perfectly free only in strict and devoted self surrender, a loving freedom is not afraid to tie itself and depend, freedom is not opposite to belonging but to constraint.
In the same way, in the name of a rationalistically understood Equality the National Assembly began its effort to redesign the very structure of the Church. Their first thought was to give a civil Constitution to the Clergy, thus forcing priests to take an oath of loyalty to the Nation; entrusting the regional Assemblies with the election of priests and bishops, reducing the dioceses to administrative structures, and renouncing distinctive signs (e.g. clerical and religious habits).
Those who did not accept these regulations could be sentenced to deportation or to death as "refractory": resistors to the idea of equality, even as Christ had stood for "inequality" Not even the Pope could stand high in that marsh of radical equality:
Christians, priests and bishops could at most venerate and inform him, but the tie with him should be kept immaterial and superfluous.
Further, the "liberation" process was to be pushed until Reason was set free from all the undue shackles and could triumphate over all the "fanaticisms": dogmas, miracles, beliefs in the heaven and similar.
As this "liberty" and this "equality" could not be accepted by Christians who wanted to stay faithful to Christ and His Church, they could not be considered "fraternal". And so the Terror came.
In the month of September 1792 alone, there were 1600 victims. Among them, at least 250 priests were slaughtered in the Carmelite convent in Paris. In 1792, at Easter, the Prioress of Compiègne, leaving each nun free to choose, proposed that those who wished might offer themselves as a holocaust to appease the wrath of God, and in order that the divine peace which his dear Son had come to bring into the world would be bestowed on the church and the state.
At first, the two oldest were taken by anguish: they were terrorized by the thought of the ghoulish guillotine; but afterwards, they decided to offer themselves together with their sisters. From that time, the community every day renewed the act of offering, during the Holy Mass, binding more and more consciously to Christ's sacrifice.
On 12th September they were ordered to abandon the monastery, which was seized.
They rented some rooms in the same quarter, in four nearby houses, divided in small groups that managed to communicate passing through the internal gardens and courts. They had no more monastery, nor cloister; neither grate nor church. They gathered regularly in the Prioress' dwelling, to be sustained and guided, otherwise they tried as they could to respect their rule of prayer, silence and work, even in such an unexpected and provisional situation.
And the whole quarter knew and tried to live more quietly and silently and with moderation, while the nun were praying.
Meanwhile, the Great Terror had begun, (October 1793 - June 1794) spurred by the war of France against other European countries, by the inner civil war, as well as by a grave economic crisis.
The revolutionary tribunal decreed the "law of suspicion". Judicial proceedings no longer entertained evidence or witnesses; suspicion alone sufficed for a sentence of death.
It was a time when the most rigorous Jacobin ideology held power: it required a complete erasing of the Christian tradition: abolition of the Christian calendar, week and Sundays, replacement of Christian names attached to people, streets, squares, villages, cities; sealing off and destruction of churches and relics, desecration of every religious building, introduction of new cults and festivities.
In this very occasion the word "vandalism" was created to indicate the mindless destruction of the artistic patrimony, just to remove each and every sign of the ancient faith.
We have some letters sent in that period to the national security committee in Paris by the man responsible for the Compiègne district, André Dumont, who had abandoned his name of André to be called Pioche ("pickaxe"):
"Citizen colleagues, the ecclesiastic rabble feels its last hour approaching... the impostures of these animals are now unmasked, and the citizens themselves offer help to clear the former churches. Pews are used in the civic societies and in hospitals. The piecesof wood called saints serve to heat the offices of public administration. The niches once called confessionals are converted in shacks for the sentinels.
The charlatans' theatres, once called altars, where the priest played magic shows, are knocked over.
The pulpits, employed in that scam, are kept for the publication of laws and to educate the people. The churches are transformed in markets, so people go buying goods and foodstuff there, where they had been swallowing poison for many centuries."
But as such zeal was not trusted in Paris, he went on insisting after some weeks:
"Your fear, regarding priests and the madmen listening to them has no foundation. The truth has made the imposture disappear, the darkness of the latter could never cast shadows over the light of the former, thus every effort of this church people would be of no avail. If the safety of the nation is to be as unquestionable as the fact that here priests are unmasked, we can rightly state that here "the Republic is safe", or, rather, that both the salvation of the fatherland is just as sure a thing as the slaughter of priests."
Actually, Pioche would then boast he had stuffed the people full of chat: he "had contented himself with sending ink, when they asked for blood". And went on proclaiming:
"Compiègne is infinitely far away from fanaticism".
"Fanatical - fanaticism: here is the word that in those days summarised and expressed the worst suspicions. Alone, it was enough to support dozens of death sentences and still is a must of anticlerical language today.
As a matter of fact, a man may well be fanatical, even in the most wicked and vulgar ways-and this is accepted as integral to the freedom of expression-but if the Church wants to allude to what she cannot renounce, or to wjat is unrenouncable to human dignity, then the charge with intolerance and fanaticism is never long in coming, always finding a choir that amplifies and spreads it. This too is our heritage from the "Enlightenment".
The Carmelites, who still lived as they had in the monastery, were then charged with fanaticism: the dwellings were searched, the nuns arrested, their holy things profaned and broken. When the tabernacle was thrown on the floor and cracked, one of the sans-culottes kicked the fragments towards a young girl saying:
"Take it, citizen; you can make yourself a dog house." At first, the nuns were at confined in an old convent converted to a prison, then they were sent to Paris together with an indictment accusing them, among other things, of "halting the progress of the public spirit, allowing in their houses people who were then admitted in another congregation, called of the scapular".
They travelled all day and night long on a cart escorted by two gendarmes, a marshal and two dragoons: the following afternoon they were thrown in the Conciergerie, the jail for those condemned to death.
Having arrived there, each one did what she could: the eldest, seventy-nine years old, with tied arms and without her walking stick, was not able to go down the cart and was thrown roughly to the pavement.
She was thought dead, but with extreme effort she stood up bleeding: "I am not angry," said she, "I thank you for not having killed me. I would have lost the happiness of martyrdom that is awaiting me".
The tribunal held the sessions at a brisk pace, with two simultaneous sessions: one in the "hall of Equality" the other in the "hall of Liberty". And the prosecutor, the notorious Fonquier-Triville easily shifted from one to the other.
This way, from fifty to sixty prisoners per day were tried. The Carmelites arrived on Sunday 13th July, a day when the tribunal pronounced forty death sentences.
On the 14th the sessions were suspended, since it was the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille. On 15th thirty prisoners were sentenced to death and thirty-six on 16th. That day, the feast of the Virgin of the Carmel, the nuns did not want to abandon the nice tradition to compose a new song for the circumstance.
And so they rewrote "la Marseillese": same rhythm, same music, even some identical expression, but a completely different song of resistance and victory. They wrote them with a piece of coal.
The evening of the same day, they were told that the following day they would be judged by the revolutionary Tribunal.
They stood trial in the "Hall of Freedom".
The prosecution was supported by a load of elements that expected to demonstrate how that small group of nuns was nothing but "a crowd of rebels, of rabble-rousers, fostering in their hearts the criminal lust to see the French people set again in shackles by their tyrants and in slavery by bloody and impostor priests: the desire to see liberty drown in the blood flood that their machinations have always poured out in the name of heaven".
It would have been laughable, had it not been the usual style of the revolutionary documents, and infallibly the prelude to a death sentence. Not even the most unbelievable charges were missing. One reads, among many other things, that they "exposed the Holy Sacrament under a baldachin in the shape of a royal mantle".
In the judge's opinion this was a certain clue of affection to the idea of royal sovereignity, and thus to the deposed family (of Louis XVI)".
But the nuns did not want their charges to be confused or entangled with politics: they wanted it to be clear that they were offering their lives to Christ and for Christ. And they saw to it that every ambiguity was removed.
Here is what happened, as stated in a witness' account:
"The nun Henrietta Pelras, having heard the prosecutor calling them "fanatical" (word that she knew well), pretended she did not know that word and said: "Would you like, citizen, explain what you want to mean with the word "fanatical"?
The judge replied angrily with a stream of insults against her and her companions. But the nun, not shaken at all, with dignity and self control replied: "Citizen, it is your duty to satisfy the question of a convict. Thus I ask you to answer and declare what you do mean with the word "fanatical".
"By that," said Fouquier-Tinville, "I mean that affection of yours to childish beliefs, those silly religious practises of yours." Nun Henrietta thanked him, then exclaimed to the Mother Prioress:
"My dear Mother and Sister, you have heard the prosecutor declare that every thing is happening because of the love we bring to our holy religion. We all desired this confession and have obtained it.
Thanks to Him who preceded us along the way of the Calvary! What a happiness and consolation when we can die for our God!"
The witness remarks: "in those times fanatical and Christian were considered synonyms and this title, if bestowed by judges, corresponded to a written sentence to death because of faith" It was six o'clock in the evening when, the same day, hands tied behind, they mounted a cart to be led towards the barrier of Vincennes, where the guillotine was raised. One observer says that the nuns managed to have their white mantles back, what's certain is that on that tumbril, at twilight, they sang Compieta, then Miserere, Te Deum and Salve Regina.
The tumbrils usally had to work their way between wings of screaming and drunken crowd. The witnesses say that that cart passed in through such a silent crowd "unprecedented during the revolution".
From the crowd, a priest, disguised as a revolutionary, gave them last absolution.
They reached the scaffold, in the old Throne Square, towards eight o'clock in the evening.
The Prioress asked and obtained from the executioner the favor to die last, so as their Mother she could assist and sustain all her nuns, especially the youngest. They wanted to die together, also spiritually, as they were making a unique and last "act of community".
It was a liturgical gesture. The Prioress asked again the executioner to wait a while, he agreed and she started singing Veni Creator Spiritus followed by the nuns. They sang it all, then renewed their vows.
At the end the Prioress moved to the scaffold's side, holding in her hand a small clay statue of the Holy Virgin, which she had managed to keep hidden so far. The young novice was the first to be executed.
Undoubedly she was recalling how her confessor had tenderly prepared her for this dramatic and solemn moment, so as not to fear the guillotine.
· They order you to mount the scaffold. Do you feel pain?
· No, Father.
· Then they make you lay your head under the blade and bend your head. Is it a torture?
· Not yet.
· The executioner let the blade fall and for just an instant you'll feel your head separate from the body, and you enter Heaven at once. Are you happy?
· Yes, Father.
· The dialogue can seem strange and in bad taste, were it not that throughout this period guillotines worked at rapid pace (thirty- forty execution each day) and decapitated heads were being shown to a screaming public, while the smell of blood spread through the city. In such conditions of constant horror, a dialogue like that quoted here is of moving and brilliant purity, even from a psychological point of view.
· The novice then knelt in front of the Prioress, asked her the blessing and permission to die, kissed the statue of the Virgin and walked the scaffold's stair, "glad, the witnesses said, as if she were going to a party" and while she climbed she started singing "Laudate dominum omnes gentes", followed by the others who, one at a time, followed her with the same peace and joy, even though it was necessary to help the oldest.
The Prioress was the last, after delivering the little statue to a person nearby (it was kept and still is in the monastery at Compiègne).
Joe Hoppe's, for instance. I console myself with a mental image of him in the tumbril. Grrr.
Le ping et le pong!
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The opera's last scene is riveting. The nuns sing Poulenc's "Salve Regina" as they are executed. The staging does not show an actual execution; rather, the nuns sing loosely grouped on stage, and at each sound of a guillotine blade falling, a nun stops singing and drops to the floor. Finally, with only the prioress and a novice singing the piece as a duet, the prioress is executed. Then the novice sings alone briefly, and she drops as she is executed. Then there is silence.
It's an amazing and moving scene.
And the French still celebrate this "revolution"?
Man is not free unless he obeys his vows. This was probably self-evident 300 years ago.
We live under the long dark shadow of the French Revolution. The corruption of the simple notions of liberty and rights of man started then. We won't be free till the silly notions of Enlightenment die.
May these holy martyrs pray for us, the Church, and our world.
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