The Catholic Church announced that it had beatified five Catholic priests in France, 152 years after the men were taken as hostages and subsequently shot in the streets by rebels of the Paris Commune. The Commune was a revolutionary group that took over the government for ten days in 1871.
Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, stated: “The story of these martyrs offers a warning for today, but also a message of hope from a Christian perspective.”
“The circumstances to which they fell victim — with several dozen other people also massacred by revolutionaries in their violent folly — constitute a tangled and complex history. It mixes all kinds of issues, overlapping conditions, social ideologies and anti-religious sentiments, appeals to truth but also rivers of lies that poison mankind.”
Our Sunday Visitor reported that the five priests shot were: Henri Planchat, Ladislas Radigue, Polycarpe Tuffier, Marcellin Rouchouze, and Frézal Tardieu. The five priests were just a few among some 200 prominent individuals who were detained. Semeraro’s statements were reportedly made at the beatification Mass in the French capital’s Saint-Sulpice Church.
He went on to compare the five martyred priests to Jesus, who was forced to carry his cross to his own execution, noting that the men had “personally lived out Christ’s words by dying with him.”
Father Alberto Toutin also spoke at the Mass, who said of the martyrs: “Their offering of life and forgiveness of those taking their lives fulfilled the faith they had received from their families, their home parishes and their congregation brothers and sisters.”
“During long, lonely hours in their prison cells, God accomplished his work, preparing them to be citizens of the ultimate homeland, while inseparably citizens of this nation — not sparing them suffering and violence, but sustaining them and making his power shine in their vulnerable flesh.”
The report noted that the Commune was declared a year after labor workers refused to accept France’s surrender to the Prussian army. The Commune’s leaders apparently targeted France’s predominant Catholic Church, eliminating religious education, and reducing areas of worship to political clubs, with one newspaper claiming that a belief in God was “a pretext for robbery and murder.”
The short-lived group was praised by Karl Marx as the first instance of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, drew inspiration from the Commune in taking down the czarist government in the East European country.
