St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

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St.Bartholomew Apology by Pope


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The Bartholomew MassacreJ. McCabe, Rationalists EncyclopaediaThe common belief that France remained loyal to the Vatican while the northern nations rebelledagainst it in the sixteenth century is entirely wrong. In spite of the expulsion of Calvin (aFrenchman), who claimed to have 300,000 followers in France, and the bloody persecution from1540 to 1550 of Protestants (or Huguenots) everywhere, the Reform ideas spread rapidly. Theheir to the throne and his brother and sons and some of the highest nobles embraced them, and inthe second half of the sixteenth century the Huguenots sustained three civil wars against theKing's armies. Pope Clement VII had married a girl of his degenerate Medici family to the equallydegenerate prince who became Henry II, and after the premature death of that monarch, in 1559, Catherine de Medici reopened France to the Jesuits, and they fabricated a Huguenot plot to sackand burn Paris.


This infamous fraud led the Catholic nobles to conspire to destroy the Huguenots,who had come to Paris in large numbers for the marriage of the young King's sister to one of theirsect. At midnight of August 23-24 (St. Bartholomew's Day), 1572, the royal troops weredischarged upon the Huguenots of Paris, and the Catholic citizens joined in the massacre. Theorder was sent also to the provinces, and led to days of carnage.Catholic apologies are here even meaner than in the case of the Albigensian Massacre. TheCatholic Encyclopaedia asserts that "the majority of historians" deny that the massacre wasorganized; an entirely false statement which is refuted by the writer's later admission thatCatherine had long meditated such a crime and had won her son to support it, and that the royaltroops had been assembled for the purpose.

The article further says that the historians Ranke andMartin admit that only 2,000 were killed at Paris, and that the Pope ordered rejoicing at Romeonly because he had received news that the King and Queen had escaped a murderous Huguenotplot. The truth is that Ranke (The Popes of Rome, 1866, II, 47) and Martin (Histoire de France,1878, IX, 270-350) and the great majority of non-Catholic historians insist that the massacre wasorganized. Martin gives one of the most shuddering accounts of what he calls "the orgy of crime."

He tells of brutal murders in the royal palace under the eyes of the King and Queen, and describesQueen Catherine and her maids callously making obscene jokes over the dead bodies ofHuguenots they had known, and Catholic boys killing babies in the cradle. Catholiccontemporaries say that 10,000 were killed at Paris. The figure of 2,000 which Martin accepts isfor one day at Paris.He finds the total number of victims about 20,000. Ranke, a more critical student, says 50,000;which means that the Catholics killed, and more brutally, more than twice as many people in afew days as the French revolutionaries killed (mainly on political grounds) in three years. As toPope Gregory XIII, the haste with which he ordered bonfires and the singing of the Te Deummight plausibly be excused on the ground which Catholic apologists now imagine - the Pope neveralleged it - but it is not disputed that he went on, while messengers with a true account continuedto arrive, to strike a gold medal with the inscription "Slaughter (strages) of the Huguenots," andfor weeks or months he had Vasari painting pictures of "the glorious triumph over a perfidiousrace." The French Court, which was sobered by the anger and disgust of Europe and nowinvented the lie about the danger to the King and Queen, tried in vain to restrain the Pope'sindecent joy. Ranke quotes Cardinal Santorio referring long afterwards to "the famous St.Bartholomew's Day which was most joyful to Catholics." Martin's long account, separatelypublished in Blackie's French Historical Series (1919), requires little correction, except that hisfigures are too low. M. Wilkinson's Problem of St. Bartholomew's Massacre (1925) is a Catholictract.



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PRO-CHOICE ARGUMENT: Part II
"Anti-abortionists talk about the sanctity of human life, yet they favor capital punishment.
"



PRO-LIFE ANSWER:
Capital Punishment is rooted in a respect for innocent human life.


History's earliest argument for capital punishment is found in the Bible. (Genesis 9:5-6). Capital punishment was to be imposed in cases of premeditated murder. The rationale is simple--innocent human life is so highly valued that if a person deliberately takes such a life, he forfeits his own right to live. Justice demands that the murderer receives the ultimate punishment.


Capital punishment is prolife in that it affirms the value of innocent human lives. Furthermore, it assures protection for the lives of other innocent people. Those who claim capital punishment is not a detterent to crime forget that those who are executed for murder do not reenter society to murder again.