Six devoted souls celebrated morning Mass on a Tuesday in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, on the outskirts of Rouen, in the Normandy region of northern France. The church was located just five miles from where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.
It was a peaceful morning as the old priest solemnly performed the rubrics of the liturgy. In the middle of Mass, the worshippers were joined by two men.
Yet these intruders were not interested in partaking in the Holy Sacrifice, or adoring the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
Rather, they wielded knives and belt packs that appeared to be explosives. They interrupted Mass and took a nun hostage. As the two young men stormed the altar, the protesting 85-year-old priest sought to repel them. “Satan, go!” the priest ordered as the 19-year-olds approached ever closer. Ignored, he was roughly forced to his arthritic knees. A few moments later, he was murdered. His throat slit, the priest died in the sanctuary of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray before his fellow Catholics, and before his God he served his whole life. He had been a priest for 58 years. His name was Father Jacques Hamel.
The date was July 26, 2016. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the jihadist terrorist group then headquartered in Raqqa, Syria, 100 miles east of Aleppo and 85 miles south of Şanlıurfa, Turkey, better known throughout history as a former Christian city that once proudly possessed an image of Christ on a cloth, popularly called by its Byzantine Greek term — mandylion. It was then called Edessa.
The mandylion was among the relics translated from the Orthodox East to the Latin West during the reign of King Louis IX (d. 1270). The eye-popping Sainte-Chapelle, which still overwhelms tourists who visit it on the l’île de la Cité in Paris, was built by Louis specifically for the relics. Alas, the Saine-Chapelle was not spared the revolutionary spirit of 1789. While it still remains intact as an architectural marvel, it was completely stripped of any of its religious significance. Today, the former royal chapel is now a museum.
As for the mandylion, like the Sainte-Chapelle and so much considered precious in the centuries of the Catholic hereditary monarchy — a timeframe known as the ancien régime — it was posited the mandylion was forever destroyed in those heady days of revolution foment.
At two o’clock in the morning on November 4, 2019, in the idyllic Pyrénées town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, only thirty miles from Lourdes and just over the mountains from the former kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon, three thieves broke into the Church of Sainte-Marie. Now part of a region called Nouvelles-Aquitaine, Oloron-Sainte-Marie is quaint, somewhat forgotten by time, situated off the Gave d’Aspe, one of three major rivers in the region and popular with kayakers.
Recalling the medieval siege tactic of a battering ram, the intruders broke through the cathedral doors by mounting a log atop their vehicle and smashing through the church’s venerable doors. They flung open with little resistance. Another car was used for their escape.
Once inside, having plundered the church treasury, the thieves swiped centuries-old chalices and other sacred vessels.
The cathedral church of Sainte-Marie, with its stonework, flying buttresses, stained-glass windows and trefoil arches looks like a time traveling spaceship, totally alien to the shops and cafes that surround it in the plaza. It is a structure that dates to the twelfth century, and for six centuries served as the former cathedral of the Diocese of Oloron. That is, until that bishopric was suppressed in the French Revolution. When Pope Pius VII reconstituted the dioceses of France in the aftermath of the First Republic, Oloron was not readmitted as a diocese. Yet the church remained an anchor for townspeople who took comfort in it.
Following the robbery, an investigator told the press that the incident felt as if it “cut [townspeople] off from their own history and heritage.”
It is impossible not to overstate the devastation wrought by the French Revolution on France’s Catholic heritage. Ironically, however, generations of Catholics uncritically viewed the revolution in France as the logical “sequel” to the American Revolution. It was seen as an event promoting freedom and democracy; something to celebrate. The Enlightenment had triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet this was also the same revolution that saw the public beheading of the French Catholic monarch, King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. Churches, their reliquaries, and liturgical items were destroyed without a second thought. The revered Besançon shroud, for instance, a copy of today’s Turin Shroud, was deemed worthless and subsequently destroyed by revolutionary authorities in 1794.
Archives and ancient treasures were forever discarded in the race to de-Christianize the climate , vaporizing any hope of piecing together a complete picture of things now lost. Dioceses and cathedrals were shuttered; monasteries, the lifeblood of France’s (and, in turn, the whole of Christendom’s) ardent faith, were plundered, property confiscated, and wiped from the map. Secularism, under the auspices of the triumph of reason, became the new law of the land. At the center was nothing less than a wholesale suppression of Catholicism as it had been known since Charlemagne, and in many ways that goal was achieved. The political chaos and intense drama from the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 to the final defeat of Napoleon more than twenty years later must have been nothing less than shocking for the average French citizen to witness. The cosmopolitan capital, Paris, continues to dominate images of French culture, but the majority of the French landscape then and now — as evidenced by anyone who follows the annual Tour de France — is rustic, bucolic, and quietly but thoroughly — perhaps even stubbornly — Catholic.
Priests were either forced to assent to the Civil Constitution that demanded religious men and women obey not Rome but the French state, or face certain death if found. This was known as Gallicanism, the idea that civil authority was preferable than the rule of the Pope.
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, just a quarter of a mile from the Sainte-Chapelle on the l’île de la Cité, was reappropriated as a Temple of Reason. In the suppression of Christianity, the atheistic regime under Maximilian Robespierre and his Reign of Terror replaced the liturgy with their own type of worship, known as the Cult of the Supreme Being. Instead of worshipping the Holy Trinity, their gods were liberté, égalité, fraternité — the revolution motto, “liberty, equality, fraternity” still proudly championed today.
In Notre-Dame, as in other cathedrals, the “Goddess of Liberty,” venerated by women resembling the Vestal Virgins from ancient Rome, replaced images and statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Stunning high altars were dismantled. Feasts, festivals and homilies honoring “liberty” replaced the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and reflections on the Gospels. Those who kept the faith bided time underground, and when the storm passed, the faith returned to France. But it was never the same as before the revolution.
All this does not mean that the French church was entirely innocent in the time leading up to the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Long before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger called the spirit of the revolution a “false progressivism,” one that also affected Church clerics:
“[A] bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain.”
The Renaissance artist Raphael depicted this centuries earlier with his fresco in the Vatican, The Mass at Bolsena. Based on a story that in 1263 at the church of Saint Cristina where a German priest doubted the host becoming the Body and Blood of Christ, Raphael shows drops of blood drip from the host onto the altar cloth. The everyday people behind the priest point in awe, but the priest is unmoved.
In France as the revolution dawned, this clerical contempt for the faith to which clergy supposedly were to devote their whole lives was a reflection of the overall decay of Catholic identity. Anti-clericalism long developed as church hierarchy reaped the benefits of massive property rights, secular and spiritual authority, and no taxes. Somewhere along the way, those entrusted to imitate Christ found cozying with the aristocracy more rewarding.
Like most revolutions, privilege and power prompted rebellion from the disenfranchised. In the case of the French Revolution, the Church was the target. This time, the church in France was too morally corrupt and ill-equipped to combat what effectively amounted to another heresy. The reliable spiritual authorities, the monastic orders, were no longer the great voice they had been for centuries, such as during the height of Cistercian influence under St. Bernard of Clairvaux. The pope was also too weak to counter the revolution. Pope Pius VI (1775–1799), though condemning the revolution, was silenced in his last years by mistreatment and imprisonment under Napoleon.
Charles Dickens best captured the era in the opening of his novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859):
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…
The French Revolution is a complex and massive subject, so much so that we are still grappling with it two centuries later. But to clear its smoldering ruins reveals a lost world —a world that still echoes to us today, when burning cathedrals, stolen relics, and martyred priests make unexpected headlines. Headlines that make us stop and take notice — of all the changes, something about this lost world continues to seize us. Here the motto of the Carthusians comes to mind: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis — “The cross is steady while the world is turning.”