The I thought I ought to mark the day here by remembering Blessed Anne-Marie-Madeleine Thouret and the martyrs of Compiegne. Before being guilottined, they knelt and sang the Veni Creator. (Sniff, excuse me, no, it's just something in my eye hrrrmph. OK now.)
Their feast day is actually on Tuesday. I was trying to remember where I had heard of them before - and of course it was my niece's Confirmation. She chose Blessed Juliette Vérolot for her patron.
9 comments:
Wow that niece must be pretty clever!like her famous uncle!
The Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook Abbey near Worcester arrived in England in the tattered clothes of the martyrs of Compiegne with whom they had been imprisoned . . . I think they still have them. . .
anonymous - thanks for that.
Wow, that is awesome, really puts a lump in your throat. Our Catholic Martyrs are unbelievably heroic people. What an inspiration to us to stay faithful to the Catholic Church and our Glorious Magisterium.
Holy Martyrs of Compiegne - pray for us.
I taught my kids about the Vendee last year. My son was reading The Scarlet Pimpenel-and it all went together quite well.
One of the more extraordinary events of my life occured was when I was Archivist to the diocese of Arundel and Brighton (a job without many extraordinary moments, I can tell you). In that capacity, when Chichester Carmel was sadly closing, I had to remove, authenticate, and reseal in a new reliquary, the wimples that the martyrs of Compiegne had removed at the scaffold in order to be guillotined. The Chichester sisters had felt, rightly, that these wimples properly belonged to the present Carmel in Compiegne, and were sending them as a gift. Funny, Fr Tim, how I often get things in my eye, hrrpmph, when I remember that privileged occasion.
Fr Seán - thank you for that story. It is very much to the credit of the sisters both that they preserved the relics with such care and that they generously gave them up.
Back to the Benedictine connection, in the words of those nuns, who had been ordered to wear secular clothes: '. . .The next day the news became public that the poor Carmelites had been all guillotined. The old clothes which before appeared of small value were so much esteemed by us that we thought ourselves unworthy to wear them, but forced by necessity we put them on, and those clothes constituted the greatest part of the mean apparel which we had on at our return to England. . .'
They put them in a reliquary and venerated them yearly on the feastday of the blessed Carmelites. . .
The story of these beautiful souls is something that should be told and told again, until it sinks in to society’s collective 'conscience'. Our 'forward-thinking' society is as morally bankrupt as C18 France and is just as eager to sacrifice the innocent and beautiful for the sake of ideological expediency. (Sorry to rant)
May they receive their eternal reward in heaven and pray for us to the One Lord, Jesus Christ.
The story of the Compiegne Martyrs was told - after a fashion - in Francis Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmelites, itself based on a play by George Bernanos and a novel by Gertrude von le Fort. The final scene is stunning. The nuns sing the Salve Regina and, one by one, go to the guillotine, until a solo voice is heard singing the Veni Creator Spiritus. Wonderful!
PS: A new english language recording has just been issued by Chandos. Well worth purchasing.
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