St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

[Zainab_M]

It is one of the bloodiest episodes in world history perpetrated by the Catholic Church that makes Al-Capone's Valentines' Day massacre look like a school picnic.  One would expect every Pope who takes over the Vatican to apologize for it each year on August 24.  So far, that's a far cry.  The Vatican hasn't even acknowledged yet that it officially followed a rule of tyranny and terror for 600 years across Europe!


It was on this date, August 24, 1572, that the bloodiest massacre of Christians by Christians began in France — the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The reformation of the corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church, which had begun in Germany, had spread to France and gained many followers, including the heir to the French throne, his brother and sons, and some of the highest French nobles. These were the French Protestants, known as Huguenots.  There was considerable tension between them and the cohabiting Christian sects.  The Huguenots had been bitterly tormented and had fought in self-defense in an attempt to preserve themselves a place in the land. A peace treaty had been signed with them a short while before the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and they wanted nothing more than to dwell in peace and to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience and their understanding of the Word of God.

Catherine de' Medici, a niece of Pope Clement VII, married the duke of Orléans at age 14. He would become King Henry II of France but died after six years of rule, and his successor, Francis II, died the year after that, leaving Catherine as regent for the 10-year-old Charles IX. Catherine let the Jesuits (or the Pope loyalists) back into France and, seeing the alarming probability that the Reformation might gain a toehold in France, the Jesuits in 1567 began circulating provocative rumors of a Huguenot plot to sack and burn Paris.

The Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, began to exercise more influence over Charles in matters of state than Catherine, so she used the occasion of a political marriage designed to make peace between Protestants and Catholics — the marriage of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois — to have Coligny assassinated. The plot failed and Coligny was only wounded, but the Huguenot leaders who assembled in Paris in great numbers for the wedding, were infuriated.  Charles vowed punishments for the plotters.

 A plan was devised by Catholic authorities in France to destroy the Huguenot Protestants by inviting them to a wedding.  With all the important 'heretics' in one place, Catherine saw her final solution to the Huguenot problem: She browbeat the young King into approving a massacre — for reasons of national security. On Sunday, 24 August 1572, at daybreak, French Catholic troops and Catholic citizens drew blood.

An eyewitness described the scene:

"The slaughter in Paris lasted until 17 September, but spread to the provinces, where it continued until 3 October. Admiral Coligny was among the dead. In all of France about 50,000 were slain — more than twice as many people killed in 40 days, as French revolutionaries killed in three years!"

When news of this holocaust of French Protestants reached the world, Catherine de' Medici received congratulatory messages from all the Catholic powers.  Once the news of the massacre reached the Vatican, celebrations were planned. Pope Gregory XIII ordered the cannons to be fired in salute, bells to be rung for a public day of thanksgiving and bonfires to be lit.  Indeed, the Pope's joy was so great that he commanded a gold medal to be minted, with the inscription, "Slaughter [strages] of the Huguenots." He then had Giorgio Vasari paint pictures in the Vatican of "the glorious triumph over a perfidious race."

This event remains to be one of the bloodiest episodes of history, along with many other such ones during the horrific Inquisition that swept across Europe from the 12th to the 19th centuries. 

Here is an excerpt from another eyewitness account by François Dubois:

“Suddenly, and without warning, the devilish work commenced. Beginning at Paris, the French soldiers and the Roman Catholic clergy fell upon the unarmed people, and blood flowed like a river throughout the entire country. Men, women, and children fell in heaps before the mobs and the bloodthirsty troops. In one week, almost 100,000 Protestants perished. The rivers of France were so filled with corpses that for many months no fish were eaten. In the valley of the Loire, wolves came down from the hills to feed upon the decaying bodies of Frenchmen. The list of massacres was as endless as the list of the dead!”

The historian Lord Acton, himself a Catholic, in 1868 wrote of the massacre:

“The story is much more abominable than we all believed…S.B. [St. Bartholomew’s] is the greatest crime of modern times. It was committed on principles professed by Rome. It was approved, sanctioned, and praised by the papacy. The Vatican went out of its way to signify to the world, by permanent and solemn acts, how entirely it admired a king who slaughtered his subjects treacherously, because they were Protestants. To proclaim forever that because a man is a Protestant it is a pious deed to cut his throat in the night…"

And again:  “The papacy contrived murder and massacre on the largest and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale. They were not only wholesale assassins but they made the principle of assassination a law of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation…[The Papacy] is the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix.”

Some more historians have written of this massacre as follows:

In three terrible days "six hundred houses were repeatedly pillaged, and 4,000 persons massacred, with all the confusion and barbarity that can be imagined"  (Ibid.).

Thousands of others were murdered outside of Paris. "All over France the massacre was carried out. The fearful scenes of Paris were repeated in almost all the kingdom. ... The massacre dragged out in the provinces for two long weary months until the persecutors, wearied of blood shedding, dropped their blunted swords" (Ian Paisley, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, pp. 110,111).

In 1997 Pope John Paul II issued a half-hearted apology of sorts.  Here's what he stated:

"On the eve of Aug. 24, we cannot forget the sad massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, an event of very obscure causes in the political and religious history of France. ... Christians did things which the Gospel condemns.  I am convinced that only forgiveness, offered and received, leads little by little to a fruitful dialogue, which will in turn ensure a fully Christian reconciliation. ... Belonging to different religious traditions must not constitute today a source of opposition and tension.  On the contrary, our common love for Christ impels us to seek tirelessly the path of full unity."

Pope John Paul II states that the cause of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is obscure. This is a half truth. There were many obscure factors involved in the behind-the-scenes intrigue which led up to the massacre, but one very evident cause of the massacre was the repeated call by various popes for the extermination of the Protestants in France.

Pope John Paul II failed to mention the role of the popes in instigating the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  He also failed to mention the public glee exhibited by Pope Gregory XIII when he learned of the butchery which had been committed. The pope did not apologize for the bloody and horrible 600-year Inquisition against humble and innocent people.  The Inquisition was not a "mistake" nor an isolated error nor the problem of a mere handful of "bad popes."  It was the formal and official policy of the highest levels of the Roman Catholic authority for centuries. The pope did not admit this. He did not condemn the Inquisition. He has not label his predecessors (his fellow popes) the murderers they were.

Therefore, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI should work on preparing a more decent apology instead of going on state visits with so much of pomp and protocols.


This post at IOL

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Fantastic stuff.  u know, I'd heard of the bartholomew's day massacre but had no idea that the details were so gory.  shocking beyond imagination.  but what shocks me most is that it's the descendents of these very people who today have the audacity to propagate that "Islam was spread by the sword."

[Ruhi_Rose]

Very apt exposure of the truth.  If this is supposed to be a religion of love for Christians, I wonder what hate would mean as per their perception.  Many Christians, unable to refute the brutal policies of the Catholic chruch try to cover up saying, this was in the past.  Present has changed.  And they blame us saying we haven't changed.  Well, firstly, the altered Christianity of the Catholic church hasn't changed at all even now.  They can't do anything not because they've changed their tyranny into love but because they don't have any powers ever since church and state got separated.  So, their hands are tied.  But if that hand got untied by some stroke of bad luck, the entire Muslim world would forcibly get converted to Chrisitianity.  They're endlessly obsessed with spreading their values.