The culminating moment of the papal
journey was the Mass celebrated at the Place de la Concorde, in the
heart of Paris, on the afternoon of September 26th, before an immense
crowd estimated at 800,000 people. An event of profound symbolic
character, given what this square once represented.
The Place de la Concorde, designed in 1755
by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, was originally known as the
Place Louis XV. The French Revolution changed the history of this site
forever. The great square became the principal theater of Jacobin
capital executions, and in 1792 it was renamed the Place de la
Révolution. The guillotine transformed capital punishment into a public
spectacle before which the Republic demonstrated its power to suppress
all “enemies of the people.” On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was
beheaded there; on October 16 of the same year, Queen Marie Antoinette
followed. The crime of Louis XVI was that of being a king. What was
condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal was not the man but the
monarchical institution he represented. The square conceived to
celebrate the oldest Catholic monarchy in Europe thus became the site of
its symbolic annihilation. “The mere title of king,” Robespierre
proclaimed, “draws down the scourges of war upon the troubled nation.”
But Robespierre himself, following Danton, was guillotined at the Place
de la Concorde in 1794: the Revolution devoured its children without
mercy.
Pope Pius VI, in the allocution Quare lacrymae
delivered in Consistory on June 17, 1793, attributed to Louis XVI “the
glory of martyrdom.” He declared: “Who could ever doubt that this king
was put to death out of hatred for the Faith and in contempt of the
dogmas of Catholicism?” At the origin of the trial and condemnation of
the French sovereign, Pius VI explained, lay the “impious ideologies” of
“perverse philosophers” — the leading figures of the Enlightenment.
From the very beginning of his pontificate, with the bull Inscrutabile Divinae
of December 25, 1775, the Pontiff, addressing the Christian people and
their pastors, had expressed his anguish at seeing that “restless and
furious men, as though driven by an irresistible passion for novelty, do
not hesitate to attack the very foundations of rational nature and
endeavor — if they could — to subvert them entirely.” The principal
revolutionary instrument was the flood of books inspired by
Enlightenment ideas that had inundated France since the reign of Louis
XV. For this reason, Pius VI exhorted the French bishops: “Remove the
evil from among you — that is, with great energy and solicitude, strive
to eliminate from your flock all these poisoned books.”
The Enlightenment constitutes a decisive
phase of that ideological process which, from the humanist and
Protestant Revolution, has led in less than five centuries to the
Communist Revolution. Lenin wrote: “We shall probably have to follow…
the advice that Engels once gave to the German socialists: to translate
and disseminate among the masses the French Enlightenment and atheist
publications of the eighteenth century.” But if it is true that the
Revolution must continually renew its errors, an authentic Catholic
reaction cannot cease to combat those errors, which have spread
throughout the world and have unfortunately penetrated even within the
Church. Leo XIV himself appeared to overlook the historical significance
of the Enlightenment, describing it in his address at the Élysée Palace
on September 25 as “a stage that brought to the world important
achievements in the domain of human rights.” And yet, the following day,
before his meeting with the synodal assembly, the Pope paused in prayer
in the garden adjacent to the Institut Catholique, before the plaque
bearing the inscription Hic ceciderunt — “Here they fell” —
marking the spot where, in September 1792, approximately 115 priests and
bishops suffered martyrdom for refusing to renounce their fidelity to
the See of Peter. The murderers of these witnesses of the faith — later
beatified by the Church — were steeped in precisely that Enlightenment
ideology which aimed to eradicate the Christian roots of society. The
Festival of the Goddess Reason celebrated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame
on November 10, 1793, marked the apogee of the dechristianization
sought by the “Philosophy of the Enlightenment.” It was for this reason
that Pius XI, in his address of October 17, 1926, on the occasion of the
beatification of the martyrs of the September massacres, recalled “the
upheaval of the public order which, at the end of the eighteenth
century, had its origin in France and swept away all things, sacred and
profane, raging not only against the king and the nobility, but above
all against the Church and her ministers. Most wicked men, who had
unlawfully seized power, masking under the appearance of philosophy the
hatred that animated them against the Church, strove with all their
might to blot out the very name of Christian.” (Read more.)
