Holy ground
CARLIN, WARREN R.
HOLY GROUND MARTYRS THEN & NOW I happened to be looking through last year's diary recently, flipping through to see what 1989 had brought me. As I look back now I suppose I will remember 1989 as...
...A guardsman, commissioner of the Forty-first Section, was appointed to preside...
...I believe I will remember 1989, for particular reasons, as the year when the Jesuits in El Salvador were murdered...
...Each was then led down a short dark corridor to an outside door...
...On September 12, 1792, a mob moved on the church...
...We were told that several religious got away across the rooftops...
...I will also remember it as the year I trod on sacred ground...
...It should have happened long before this...
...So I began walking toward St...
...Germain des Pres...
...Just as it will probably happen some day in that yard in the Jesuit university in San Salvador...
...But almost immediately a captain of the National Guard, who was in charge of the operation, decided to set up a courts martial in the sacristy of the church...
...There the mob had awaited the victim...
...Here are some of the things I learned: At the time of the revolution this church belonged to the Carmelites...
...As the plaque pointed out, more than one-hundred priests had been killed in this church during the revolution...
...Some years later they were recovered, and today the skulls and bones of those martyred priests can be seen in glass cases in the crypt of the church...
...Churches are not made to be lived in...
...What I really saw was a quiet, sunlit garden, in the middle distance, a stone monument to an old priest murdered while meditating...
...I was in Paris that summer for the bicentennial of the French Revolution...
...In effect this oath placed the state at the head of the church and removed from Rome any authority in the appointment of bishops and pastors...
...But the traffic with its noise and fumes, the hordes of tourists and shoppers all conspired to dissipate my mood...
...Then, for a while, the monks were left alone...
...But I couldn't help think that the holiness of this particular one had been paid for dearly...
...The mob murdered him on the spot, and today a small monument bears witness to the deed...
...It was time for an aperitif...
...I came out of the gardens and began walking along the rue de Vaugirard...
...But I couldn't help thinking that it would make for rather squalid living conditions for 160 people...
...In 1789 the monks were required to give up all of their silverware to the nation, which confiscated at the same time the monks' library of twelve thousand volumes...
...It was a large church, and of course, like most European churches, it did not contain pews...
...A few moments before, I had been standing on holy ground...
...It was the place of worship for their monastery and served also for the worship and sacramental life of the neighborhood...
...By 1792, however, the nation was on the brink of declaring itself a republic and, among other things, demanded of the clergy and of all religious consent to the infamous Constitution Civile du Clerge...
...There was only five of us, so we moved quickly and could easily ask questions...
...An elderly priest, Father Guirauld, was meditating in the relative quiet, seated on a stone bench near a round fish pond...
...I walked through the little door leading to the garden and tried to imagine how one of the victims might have felt and what he saw as he emerged in front of the mob...
...He merely ordered the one who had refused to be taken to the garden...
...It was here in the garden that they found their first victim...
...But then the nation had no intention of letting those hostages live...
...One by one the prisoners were brought in and asked to take the oath...
...In a minute or so I came to a church, one with which I was not familiar...
...Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't...
...He sat at a table in an adjoining room and opened the register containing the hostages' names...
...I joined the cluster...
...Joseph of the Carmelites...
...And then, on one occasion when I wasn't even trying, the mood snuck up on me, history and geography collided, and a spark was struck...
...Now I was back in banality...
...They immediately spread out in all the buildings and the garden...
...But it was purely an effort of the imagination...
...As I listened to all this, I looked around the church...
...I crossed over to read it and discovered that the church was called St...
...On the small stone porch I noticed an inscription in gold letters: "Hie deciderunt...
...Here they fell...
...Refusal to submit to this oath was, in the beginning, cause for arrest, but it didn't take long before refusal was seen as a capital offense...
...As I look back now I suppose I will remember 1989 as the year of the San Francisco earthquake, of the uprising in China, and of the revolution in Eastern Europe and that wild night when the Berlin Wall ceased being a wall...
...A little old priest was gathering a small group around him, explaining the origins of the church, its dates, and it architecture...
...The officer did not pass a death sentence as such...
...I suppose all churches are holy places in this world...
...Joseph des Cannes...St...
...I was aware of taking a kind of symbolic step back in time, of becoming a citizen of history...
...The victim, it seems, had just enough time to see the pile of bodies at the foot of the steps before having his own throat cut...
...I stood, for example, on the spot where Camille Desmoulins harangued the crowd to take to the streets and begin the revolution, and in my imagination I conjured up the sounds of the speech, the aspect of that crowd, and the tension of the moment...
...I stood in the Place de la Concorde and tried to imagine the guillotine, the crowd anxious for blood...
...Thus in early August 1792, the Carmelite chapel was transformed into a prison housing 160 priests who had refused to take the oath...
...As luck would have it, a visite guidee was just beginning...
...Once through the door one is on a small porch with five steps leading down to the garden...
...In their number were two bishops and the king's confessor...
...And I couldn't help thinking that some day aircon-ditioned buses will be bringing pious pilgrims to this spot...
...They were accompanied by about twenty soldiers of the nation and almost all were armed with pikes or sabers...
...Those bodies, all 160 of them, were thrown down a well...
...I had that feeling of awe that comes over us when we are in the presence, morally or physically, of martyrdom...
...And one by one they refused...
...WARREN R. CARLIN...
...I had been reading in the Luxembourg Gardens on a warm, sunny afternoon...
...On the wall facing the street was a plaque...
...Holy ground never loses its force or attraction...
...It was easy to see it as a holding pen for recalcitrant priests...
...They demanded entrance to the church and the convent, and after a long discussion were allowed in...
...As I stood in the sacristy-an immense sacristy as big as most monastery refectories today-I could sense the fear and the horror of the condemned, and even the madness of the mob...
...It was a strange walk back on the rue de Vaugirard with the traffic and the blare of noises...
...That piqued my curiosity, so I went in hoping to find other plaques with more information...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
