| Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III |
Although the big Revolution had occurred nearly a century before, nearly every political dispute of Thérèse's own time had roots there. And even though there had been no major upheaval of the same magnitude since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, there were still many of the same questions of the whole knotty problem of church-state relations which were not yet resolved. These questions were still open wounds, which were festering, and creating great problems for otherwise good people. Before 1789, that is, before the Revolution, both the monarchy and the established church had been considered the two venerable pillars of society. Both were quite distinct institutions, of course, but they tended to blend together in the popular mind: when you thought of one, you were naturally reminded of the other, for better or for worse. So when the members of the National Assemblie, at the very beginning of the Revolution, set their sights on reforming the monarchy, the church was the next, obvious thing on their agenda.
From the standpoint of the church and the religious orders. in France, many of those who took leadership during the Revolution were very unfriendly to traditional religion. Although many of these people were noble, educated and high-minded individuals, they also tended to follow the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Among the reformers, there were many agnostics, Freemasons and Deists, but very few devout, practicing Catholics. This is the heart of our problem. Unfortunately, there was very little to admire in the leadership of the French church before the Revolution. Every single one of the bishops in 1789 was from a noble family, there were 110 commoners not even one. And some of these were also agnostics, in spite of their offices. Many of these aristocratic prelates - those who were part of the problem - were from specific families where there was a long tradition of church service, mainly in the upper clergy, of course. One such dynasty was the de Rohan family; there was a Cardinal de Rohan at the time who was just the latest in a long line of bishops, prelates, and abbots going back for centuries. Another clan was the Tallyrand-Perigord family. Its latest champion was tile famous Maurice de Tallyrand who would go down in history as one of its most astute politicians, as well as a famous turncoat. He began as. bishop of Autun, even though he was one of those agnostics. He was a superb administrator, and very consistently followed what his family expected of him, which was to hold a bishopric or two open for them. He was quite good at that. Preaching, sacraments, liturgy were expendable, because nearly everyone considered them so.
People did not trust bishops to do those things well in the French church. Bishops were not expected to be theologians, but to create jobs. One had to look elsewhere for most of the holiness, most of the piety, most of the good, hard work which made their church a true "people of God." The virtuous were certainly alive and well -- France did not have a dead church by any means. But to find these best people you had to look in convents, in country rectories, in peasant communities. Living in some farming hamlets was almost like growing up in a novitiate, because of the many holy people there.
There was certainly no general elitism in these places. Still, many bishops were so far detached from ordinary, good Catholics and their concerns, that they were very much part of the overall problem. They were administrators and princes first, and pastors as a very poor second, if at all. The chasm between them and the lower clergy was immense. So when the crisis finally hit, the church went through the Revolution quite badly, as we will see. One can understand a few reasons why educated people of that time might view their church as an obsolete, dying institution, a block to progress, a refuge for superstition and emotional hysteria.
After all, the Deists of the Enlightenment had very effectively sold their image of the Creator-God as a "Divine Watchmaker:" a powerful and intelligent being, who could create this wonderfully complex universe with its interlocking physical laws, but who was likewise completely devoid of any emotion and feeling. In other words, the Deists' God was total intellect God, literally, didn't care about the world. So why should anyone else care in the slightest about making contact with this aloof, unfeeling Creator-Spirit? Can you imagine anything further from the way Thérèse looked at God? There was. only one century of difference, but it was. like night and day.
So for Enlightenment partisans, some church institutions had obvious social value, such as hospitals, schools, or work among the poor. Other practices like religious poverty, celibacy, intercessory prayer, penance, and fasting were looked upon as valueless (because God wouldn't care) and possibly even dangerous, insofar as they promoted ignorance and misunderstanding among credulous people about the scientifically perfect universe. Seen in this context, people in a cloistered convent might seem perfectly harmless to those of us who know something about them, but they represented a possible threat to people who were schooled in the Enlightenment. They represented much of what these forward-looking modernizers hated and wanted to destroy. And they almost succeeded. Even a century later, the Lisieux Carmel represented the failure of the anti-clericals' earlier campaign to eliminate religious orders. When the Third Republic was founded; there were at least some of these anti-clericals, a "remnant of Babylon," who felt that they had to try again.
Beginning in the fall of 1789, a series of laws were passed which were intended to smash the political power of the church, and systematically dismantle the fabric of religious life. In October of that year, all church property was seized and sold to pay off the national debt. The original suggestion was made by a bishop (Talleyrand) who was already smelling a change in the political wind. In February of the following year; religious orders and congregations were abolished and all communities. suppressed, except for those doing "practical" apostolic work. Their property also went to the state.
In July of 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was published. According to that law, priests. were ordered to take an oath to the state, and became salaried employees in what amounted to a national, state church. Religious vows could be declared null and void if the individual would simply ask for release before a civil magistrate; most religious were aggressively encouraged to do so. There were government commissions which made the rounds. of religious houses and insisted on speaking with each individual in the community. They proceeded to explain the great favor which was now being offered by the revolutionary government, (They assumed, of course, that the religious were all there as semi-prisoners, against their will, and not voluntarily.) There were some religious who decided to take advantage of their new liberation, and were released from all legal bonds to their orders; most of these, with their newfound "freedom," then began to look for jobs. But all the rest, those who decided to stay, were still not allowed to live in community, wear religious habits and pray in public. So they could continue, if they wished, in their obscurantism, but the government was not going to make it easy for them.
We know that the Carmelites, as a religious family, were wiped out in the Revolution. This means that eight provinces of the Ancient Observance were eliminated; and there were another six provinces. of Discalced friars destroyed. This translates to 130 houses of the Ancient Observance with 721 friars, much diminished from the numbers of just a century before. The Discalced lost seventy-nine houses of friars and sixty-five monasteries of cloistered nuns. Some of the Discalced religious managed to maintain their identity long enough to refound a house here or there, but for the Ancient Observance, the suppression was permanent. There were no successful foundations after the Revolution, and still have not been. For the past two centuries, all French Carmelites. have been Discalced.
Some of these refoundations took place because the religious simply went underground to survive. Some communities, in effect, never really died out, even though their houses were gone. In both branches of the Order; there were priests or brothers or sisters who managed to maintain connections with one another. They lived a genuine "catacomb" existence until it was finally safe to reemerge once the political storms had blown over. But such a success did not happen all that quickly or all that often.
We have the horrible image of many priests and religious being killed during the Reign of Terror, and there certainly were large numbers of martyrs. But since it appears that most of those sent to the guillotine were not Carmelites, it is fair to assume that most of our evicted religious simply blended back into the general population and attempted to carry on as best they could. In effect, these religious were condemned to the slow death of suppression. We do know of a Carmelite connection to the September Massacres of 1792, which began the bloodbath against the clergy and religious. This first episode of the Reign of Terror began at the Discalced Carmelite house on the Rue de Vaugirard. That house had been allowed to function a bit longer than others, principally because many of the friars of the community had favored many of the good changes enacted by the Revolution. But in time even these friars were turned out and the municipal government promptly turned their house into a prison for members of the "black clergy;" diocesan priests who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the government. Quite a number of these were killed in early September Massacres (there and elsewhere) were probably some 1400 people, including three bishops and several hundred priests - all killed by people who didn't know their names. It was a frightful example of generic, mindless fear, combined with a certain element of pent-up rage against the church for real and imagined offenses from the past. The revolutionary government was able to document the fact that there were no substantial charges against any of the individuals killed.
When it comes to Carmelite martyrs of the Revolution, we are probably most familiar with the sixteen nuns. of Compiègne, the sisters of this particular monastery were steadfast enough to stand against the discriminatory laws, and thus became immortalized in the Dialogues of the Carmelites by Bernanos and Poulenc. Both artists do a fine job of highlighting the nuns' heroism, albeit without following much of the details of what really happened to them. It is worth noticing, by the way, that these sixteen very heroic women were executed only ten days before the virtual end of the Reign of Terror. I suspect that the spectacle of these sisters being sent to the guillotine, wearing as much of the Carmelite habit as they could piece together from bits of salvaged clothing, was just too much for public opinion to accept. I have a hunch that there was enough revulsion in even the most bloodthirsty members of the Paris mob, people who had seen thousands of prisoners killed for real and Imagined crimes, to see that these were not "enemies of the people" in any sense. Maybe the Reign of Terror had gone on just a bit too long. Within less than two weeks, Maximillian Robespierre, the Jacobin leader who was the heart and soul of the Terror, was himself captured and sent to the guillotine. Once he was dead, the Terror stopped as well.
By the time of Napoleon, only a few years later, one of the first things that the self-proclaimed First Counsul knew that he had to do was finally work out some kind of peace between church and state in France. One of Napoleon's most successful actions was the signing of the Concordat of 1801 between France and Pope Pius VII. In so doing, restored effective peace with the pope and the French bishops, and they in turn allowed a certain degree of compromise on such issues as the loss of church hands, the long overdue reform of diocesan boundaries, a certain amount of state influence over selection of bishops, and so forth.
But it is important to remember that the Concordat, while it ended the persecution and the cold war with the church in general, did not help the religious orders one bit. As shown, the religious orders themselves were seen as subversive organizations, as people who were preserving the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, as it was conceived; above all, since the orders were international, they were deemed "agents of a foreign power" (the one in Rome). Even among the bishops, the orders were not a high priority. So it would take quite a while before the religious in France would be able to make any sort of recovery.
At this point, it will help to briefly distinguish two trends within the French church: Gallicanism and Ultramontanism. Gallicanism favored a strongly national church which was relatively independent of Rome, although technically "in communion" with the pope (whatever that actually meant in practice). The other tendency was Ultramontanism, which favored a very close collaboration between France and the papacy. Now in theory these two trends will continue, with a few modifications, all through the next century, until the time of Thérèse. By that time, both of them were beginning to wither and die, or more accurately, blend together and salvage the good points of both. The "good" reason for Ultramontanism in the nineteenth century was the need to respond to the post-revolutionary society with a strongly centralized church, uniform in doctrine, clerical lifestyle, discipline, and governed by an infallible pope and a watchful Roman Curia. The Gallicans, on the other hand, favored a strongly French church with only ceremonial ties to Rome. They believed that the church would lose all influence in modern society unless It had very deep roots in the national character and local institutions, with only a very loose federal, collegial structure.
In practice, this boiled down to something a bit less noble, such as which way money was allowed to flow. Historically, contributions sent from France to Rome were always among the first items to he eliminated whenever this problem came up. Essentially, the bishops were declaring a degree of financial independence from the need to support the papacy beyond what they felt was a properly symbolic level. Likewise, there was a great deal of pride and national sentiment in the Gallican position. They stressed the idea of a "splendid isolation" from foreign tampering, and glorified the concept of totally independent French prince-bishops who were supreme and unfettered in their own sees. They were not too favorable to religious orders, of course, since orders tended to be too international, and governed by the pope or by a Father General who lived somewhere other than France.
Unfortunately for the Gallicans, they discovered only too late that, by the time they nearly eliminated Roman influence (near the middle of the eighteenth century), they had isolated themselves from just the people who could have helped them against the revolutionary government. Ironically, the eighteenth century Gallicans doomed their church, because they were no longer able to appeal for any sort of international sympathy or aid. Just by way of contrast, we might recall that someone as recent as Titus Brandsma gloried in the idea that he belonged to a universal church which had nothing whatever to do with Dutch nationalism. He was able to speak both In Holland amid in Germany with much greater authority, simply because he was not bound to the political policies being promoted in those countries.
By contrast, the Ultramontane position was. strong on centralization in Rome and all of the control that its policy implied. But It was also much better at following the global perspective, and not being swept away by national politics which, after all, have a way of changing around very quickly. Above all, the centralized Roman church was always much better at promoting mission activity In foreign lands, which of course weren't strong enough to have national churches. So from the perspective of what the church probably needed, at least in the nineteenth century, the centralized model seemed to work better when it was allowed to work at all.
| Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III |