A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew's Day
- A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge - a painting by John Everett Millais
Today is the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles. I'm reminded of a book I read years ago, after The Three Musketeers - La Reine Margot by Dumas (it was also adapted into film in 1994 -La Reine Margot - starring Isabelle Adjani) .....
It is set in Paris in August 1572 during the reign of Charles IX (a member of the Valois dynasty) and the French Wars of Religion. The novel's protagonist is Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of the infamous Catherine de' Medici and the deceased King Henry II, and it focuses on her story during the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, especially her love affair with the Protestant La Mole and her marriage to Henry IV ...
And here is a little from Wikipedia about the terrible St Bartholomew's Day Massacre ....
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), traditionally believed to have been instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of Charles IX. Starting on August 24, 1572, with the murder of a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris, and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months. The exact number of fatalities is not known, but it is estimated that several thousand or possibly tens of thousands of Huguenots died in the violence. Though by no means unique, "it was the worst of the century's religious massacres." .....
Really awful stuff. I'd like to say we Catholics now embrace ecumenism, but sadly we seem to be doing the backstroke on that issue since Vatican II.
posted by crystal | 12:43 AM
3 Comments:
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Crystal,
I revere Good Pope John XXIII and the ecumenical stance he urged, but sometinmes I wonder if he ever heard of Bob Jones University.
Oh, just go read Ian Paisley's website for a little while, and you won't feel so bad about the "subsists" flap. View the guestbook. Most of his fans are in the USA, not Ulster. They are a frightening bunch of people, and ecumenism is not in their vocabulary. Parallel types of anti-Catholic websites are more numerous than stars in the sky. In addition to fringe wingnuts, try supposedly mainstream guys John McArthur, James White, R.C. Sproul, John Ankenberg, Phil Johnson, Jimmy Swaggart, etc.... Well, one could go on and on forever...
Regarding St. Bart's Day and the Huguenots, Queen Margot covered it well. I only saw it because I was once besotted with Isabelle Adjani, but it was very, very good.
I'm still reading about the life of Ignatius, and there was an interesting incident while he was at the university in Paris ... John Calvin coolaborated on a speech with the university president that was so anti-Catholic it caused a riot and Calvin had to escape Paris by climbing down bedsheets from a window and going off in desguise. The weird thing is, Ignatius never even mentions it in his autobiography.
I know there are anti-Catholics and anti-Protestants, but I just keep thinking God is a universalist.
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