In the Year of Priests, it’s fitting to remember one of the biggest anti-priest bloodbaths of the French Revolution.
On this day in 1792, and tomorrow (hey, you can’t kill Rome in one day!), French revolutionaries in Paris executed 191 priests who refused to swear oaths agreeing to total government control of the Church. The revolutionaries did not have the courage to do this in public. Instead they sent a “Vigilance Committee” (a vigilante band of about 150 armed men) to kill the priests in their prisons.
This was only the beginning of a massive wave of violence, in which thousands of people were executed as traitors in horrible ways, mostly in the prisons, by this “Vigilance Committee”. It was called the September Massacres. The French Wikipedia has a more complete account. It appears that 75% of those killed were ordinary thieves, prostitutes, and other common criminals. It must have been very bewildering for them to be executed as aristos and enemies of the state. Afterwards, in the cool light of day, the revolutionaries ordered that the same be done in other French cities.
By the end of 1792, over 1500 priests, deacons, minor clerics, and religious brothers and sisters would be killed in the name of State superiority over religion. Thousands of other French people were killed for… oh, no particular reason, except that the State could do it. Sickening.
What’s worse, we see this idea return again and again — that the worship of the eternal God must not just work with, but bow to the worship of the temporary government of man — and that humanity’s best use is as pawns, to be sacrificed at will to political theory or expediency. Being a good citizen is not enough for some people; they insist that everyone else become good slaves.
Read the long list of these blessed martyrs, and ask them to pray for us.
Here is a more complete account in English of what happened to the priests.
Aliens in This World 