It is so edifying to reflect on how courageous the martyrs of the Church were in professing the true faith even if it cost them their lives. Take for example the thousands and thousands who were slaughtered during the French Revolution. Their “crime” was to refuse to go along with the new neo-pagan religion that was officially established to replace Catholicism. Here is the story of one of these martyrs, Blessed Jean-Georges Rehm (1752-1794), as recounted in the publication which many of you have called “Magnificat.” Father Jean-Georges Rehm served as a priest of the Dominican Order in France. On November 29, 1791, the Jacobin regime of the French Revolution ordered all French priests to take the oath of the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” an edict of the revolutionary regime demanding that bishops be appointed by the votes of the local clergy rather than by the authority of the papacy. In August of 1792, the Jacobins threatened to imprison or deport to French Guiana all priests refusing to take this oath. Father Rehm, arrested for his refusal of the oath, was taken to Rochefort, where he was put aboard a docked fleet of prison ships with over eight hundred other priests and religious refusing the oath. He encouraged his fellow prisoners by giving them hope amid their sufferings. Succumbing to the squalid conditions on the prison ships, he died on August 11, 1794, at the age of forty-two.
Pray my brothers and sisters that you and I will have the same courage if we were ever to face persecution for our faith in Jesus Christ!
Fr. Paul
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