Feast day: September 2
The Martyrs of September 1792
Some two hundred bishops, priests, and religious massacred in the prisons of Paris during the French Revolution for refusing the oath that would have split them from the pope.
The September Martyrs were a large group of Catholic clergy and faithful slaughtered in Paris over a few days at the beginning of September 1792, during the bloodiest convulsion of the French Revolution — the so-called September Massacres. Of the many who died, the Church has formally beatified around one hundred and ninety-one.
The Revolution had demanded that priests swear an oath subordinating the Church to the new state; those who refused, in conscience, were branded enemies and outlawed. As foreign armies advanced on Paris and panic and fury swept the city, mobs and revolutionary tribunals turned on the imprisoned 'refractory' clergy who would not take the oath.
On the 2nd and 3rd of September, bands of armed men forced their way into the prisons and improvised convent-jails where the clergy were held — among them the Carmelite house in Paris — and butchered them. Many were offered their lives if they would swear the oath; the beatified martyrs are precisely those who refused, choosing death rather than betray their faith and their Church.
Three bishops and well over a hundred priests were among them, killed simply for fidelity to the Catholic faith. Beatified in 1926, they are remembered together as witnesses who would not let the violence of the age frighten them into apostasy.
Offered their lives if they would swear an oath against the Church, more than a hundred and ninety chose death in the Paris prisons in a single bloody week.
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11480c.htm
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