From the desk of the pastor for March 22, 2026

The Lord be with you! After the last few articles, I realized that we had skipped over a momentous event for the Church: the French Revolution. This tragic upheaval shook the ecclesial and political foundations of Europe and almost ended the Church in France.

On the night of November 2, 1789, the newly formed French National Assembly voted to seize all property belonging to the Catholic Church in France. It was an act that would have seemed unthinkable a generation earlier — and it was only the beginning. The French Revolution, which erupted in 1789 and convulsed Europe for a decade, is often remembered as a triumph of liberty and reason. From the perspective of the Church, however, it was something far more ambiguous: a catastrophe laced with genuine grievances, a time of heroic martyrdom, and a crisis that would force Catholicism to reckon with the modern world for the next two centuries.

The Church in 18th-century France was not without fault. The French clergy were a privileged estate, exempt from taxation while peasants starved. Many bishops lived more like aristocrats than shepherds. Corruption and absenteeism were real problems. When ordinary people cried out for justice, some of their anger was directed, not without reason, at an institution that had grown too comfortable with power. But the Revolution did not reform the Church. It attempted to destroy it.

In 1790, the Assembly imposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, demanding that priests and bishops swear loyalty to the revolutionary state above the Pope. It was a demand that struck at the heart of Catholic identity. Roughly half the clergy refused — and those who refused became outlaws. Hundreds of priests were imprisoned, deported, or killed. In September 1792, mobs in Paris massacred more than two hundred priests and bishops in what history remembers as the September Massacres. These martyrs died with the name of God on their lips.

The Reign of Terror that followed under Robespierre brought active de-Christianization. Churches were looted and closed. The Cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed the "Temple of Reason." A new revolutionary calendar was invented to erase the Christian week and its Sundays. Statues were smashed. The aim was nothing less than the elimination of Christianity from French public life.

And yet the faith survived — not despite the persecution, but in some ways through it. The Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne, sixteen nuns guillotined in 1794, went to the scaffold singing hymns. Their witness lit a flame that could not be extinguished. Ordinary Catholic families hid priests, maintained the sacraments in secret, and passed the faith to their children at great personal risk.

The Revolution taught the Church hard lessons about the dangers of entanglement with earthly power — lessons that echoed through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council nearly two centuries later. It also revealed something the revolutionaries did not expect: that faith rooted in genuine love of God is stronger than the guillotine.

In His Sacred Heart,

Fr. John