With the Protestants it was "Down with Rome!"
With the philosophers from the enlightenment it was "Down with Christ!"
With the atheists it was "Down with God!"
Today - after putting man in God's place - they are busy working on "Down with man!"
Here's a look back into the glorious achievements of those who want to give us liberty, equality and fraternity. Anybody ever wondered why "justice" never was part of the slogan?
"In 1792, the radical Jacobins determined to punish with death not only the aristocrats, but clergy who had refused the oath.
The “non-jurors” - those who had refused the oath - were arrested en masse in August, 1792, and herded into several Parisian monasteries out of which the resident monks had been driven. These prisoners were priests, bishops and religious from many dioceses. Then on September 2, a band of violent armed men, perhaps 150 in number, was sent by the “Committee of Vigilance” to one after the other of these temporary prisons. One detail arrived at the Abbey of St. Germain just when a number of prisoners got there, transferred from other places of detention. The executioners shot them down in cold blood. Then they went to the old Carmelite monastery, where another group of cutthroats joined them. They ordered all the prisoners to come out into the garden, even the oldest and most disabled. The clerics had already discussed once more the question of taking the oath, and all had agreed they could not and would not subscribe to it.
Now the gang fell upon the first priests they met and cut them down. Then they called out, “The Archbishop of Arles!” Archbishop John du Lau of Arles was praying in the chapel. When summoned, he came out and he said, “I am he whom you seek.” Thereupon, they cracked his skull, stabbed him and trampled him underfoot. Then the leader set up a “tribunal” before which the imprisoned were herded and ordered to take the oath. All refused; so, as they passed down the stairway, they were hacked to pieces by the murderers. The bishop of Beauvais had earlier been wounded in the leg. When summoned, he answered, “I do not refuse to die with the others, but I cannot walk. I beg you to have the kindness to carry me where you wish me to go.” For a moment, his courtesy silenced the assassins. But, when he, too, refused the oath, he was killed like the rest.
Later on the purge was carried out elsewhere in France. Some 200 clergymen fell that September, and they were only a small percentage of the 1500 clergy, laymen and laywomen who were massacred in 1792 alone.
Pope Pius XI beatified 191 of the priest martyrs, in 1926, assigning to them the title of “Blessed John du Lau and Companions, Martyrs.”
They had been the helpless victims of wild revolutionary ideology. As usual, however, their heroism in the defense of the papacy was remembered long after the names of their blood-thirsty executioners had been forgotten. They saved the reputation of France as “eldest daughter of the Church.”
Fr. Robert F. McNamara
The French Revolution was rich in atrocities, but what happened on September 2nd and 3rd in 1792 shows the scum from its most despicable side. Let us never forget, that every instance to push our Holy Catholic Religion from the public sphere has always been and will always be just the preparation for something bigger and bloodier.
Blessed Jean-Marie Du Lau D’Alleman, Blessed Francois-Joseph De La Rochefoucauld-Maumont, Blessed Pierre-Louis De La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, Blessed 188 Companion Martyrs, PRAY FOR US!
