Attending the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York City is seen as one of the highest cultural experiences one can have in America. On any given night, one is likely to see people dressed elegantly in tuxedos and ballgowns coming to listen to beautiful music performed by the world’s best musicians. As a young seminarian, I had the once-in-a- lifetime experience of going to the Met to see Francis Poulenc’s famous opera, Dialogues des Carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites). On this night, in addition to all the expected high-society opera connoisseurs, one could see a smattering of women in religious habits and priests in clerical garb dispersed throughout the famous auditorium. From the get-go, I could tell this would not be a normal trip to the opera.
Going into the opera, I was only mildly aware of the story of the Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne. If I am honest, I was most excited at the idea of a free trip to the Met; the fact that the specific show was based on something Catholic was an added bonus. As the acts progressed, however, I found myself absolutely captivated by its beauty, and not merely the beauty of the music, which of course was exquisite. What moved me was the beauty of those sixteen consecrated women offering their lives together for the good of their beloved France, which was mired by the tyranny and barbarism of the revolution. It occurred to me that the beauty of true Christian charity, the laying down of one’s life for one’s friends which the Lord has done for us and beckons us to follow in, peels back the veil between heaven and earth to reveal to us the heart of God, a beauty par excellence.
For those who have not seen the opera, the protagonist is a young woman named Blanche de la Force, who struggles with a crippling fear of suffering and death. She enters the Carmelites, perhaps as a way of hiding from the world and its terrors. As the French Revolution progresses, persecution finds its way even to the refuge of Carmel, where the sisters are forced out of the convent and into the world. In the face of the seemingly inescapable darkness, the nuns profess a ‘vow of martyrdom’, promising to offer their lives for peace in their native land. Blanche, unable to cope with her debilitating fear, flees back to the safety of her family.
Even outside the convent, the nuns continue to gather clandestinely for prayer and the Sacrifice of the Mass, until they eventually are arrested, put on trial, and condemned to death as ‘enemies of the people’. In one of the most moving scenes I have ever seen, the sisters face the terror of the guillotine, singing the praises of God and the Blessed Mother, and offering their lives in love as they sing the Salve Regina, followed by the Veni Creator Spiritus. As each sister ascends the scaffold and is executed, the choir grows softer and softer, until Sister Blanche suddenly appears out of the crowd, resolute and without fear as she chants the final verse of doxology before herself being decapitated and ending the show in a haunting but grace-filled silence:
Deo Patri sit gloria
Et filio qui a mortuis
Surrexit ac Paraclito
In saeculorum saecula.
Taking this all in as a young seminarian, full of zeal to serve the Lord as a priest, yet also aware of my weakness and fears about the future, I felt as though my heart had been ripped open and filled with the love of God. Walking out of that opera house, I knew that I had met an entire convent of spiritual mothers whose intercession I wanted to seek as I continued on my journey, so I desired to learn all that I could about these brides of Christ. I’ve always been a big reader, so shortly thereafter, I devoured Georges Bernanos’ Dialogues des Carmélites and Gertrud von le Fort’s The Song at the Scaffold, both of which inspired Poulenc to compose his opera. It was only later, however, in my seminary Church History course, that I came to realise that this story was a fictionalised account merely based on the real events, and that there really was no Blanche de la Force at all. Yet, trusting that my experience at the opera was not fake, I sought to learn the truth of the Carmelites of Compiègne.
It was at this moment that I discovered the Orthodox Christian author William Bush and his work To Quell the Terror: The True Story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne.[1] Reading this book, I realised that the true story of the sisters was actually even more captivating than the fictional one! Bush beautifully shows how these nuns not only offer us the witness of how God’s grace allows us to overcome the fear of death (as Bernanos, von le Fort and Poulenc demonstrate), but how they reveal to us the vocation of martyrdom and what this reveals about God Himself.
One of the beautiful things Bush focuses on in his book is the saintly mother superior, Mother Teresa of St Augustine, and her inspiration for the sisters to make a ‘community act of consecration for holocaust’. Getting into all the details of the French Revolution far exceeds the scope of this short article; nevertheless, Mother Teresa watched French society continue to deteriorate as the nation moved farther and farther away from its Christian foundations. Church property was seized, holy days were replaced with civic celebrations, priests were forced to take oaths to the government, religious vows were banned, and convents eventually cleared out. After the introduction of the guillotine as the new ‘civilised’ form of capital punishment, anyone who disagreed with the values of the new regime were swiftly done away with in brutal fashion.
As she observed all of the chaos in her beloved nation, Mother Teresa discovered a text from almost one hundred years before, which completely captivated her. In 1693, a nun named Sister Elisabeth Baptiste had a ‘mystic dream’ in which she saw a group of sisters who had been called to ‘follow the Lamb’ and were crowned with their Divine Spouse in heaven. Reading and praying with this dream, Mother Teresa felt as though the Lord Himself was inviting her and her sisters, in the midst of the chaos of their times, to ‘follow the Lamb’ (cf. Rev 14:4) in a particular way. She thus proposed to her sisters that they daily make an act of consecration for holocaust, expressing their willingness to offer everything to the Lord to bring about peace and the conversion of hearts, even to the offering of their very lives.
Uniting themselves each day to the self-offering of Christ, their opportunity would indeed come, as they were arrested in late June of 1794, and eventually received word that they would be tried on July 16, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, their patronal feast! The next day they were officially condemned as ‘fanatics’ and ‘enemies of the people’.
As Poulenc depicts in the opera, the sisters did indeed go their deaths singing God’s praises, but in an even more beautiful fashion. According to Bush, as they made their way to the scaffold to face execution, the sisters sang all the way, chanting Vespers and the Office of the Dead to prepare to meet Christ, the Salve Regina to implore the intercession of their maternal patroness, the triumphant words of the Te Deum as the guillotine came into view, boldly proclaiming Christ’s victory over death to the stunned crowds, and finally invoking the Holy Spirit in the Veni Creator as they renewed their vows one last time. Then, as each sister approached the barbaric instrument, they each knelt before Mother Teresa, asking for her maternal blessing one last time: ‘Permission to die, Mother?’ ‘Go, my daughter!’ Sister Constance, the youngest among them, was the first to die, and as she climbed the steps, she sang out the words of the great Psalm 117: ‘Praise the Lord, all ye nations! Praise Him all ye people! For His mercy is confirmed upon us, and the truth of the Lord endureth forever! Praise the Lord!’ Who would not be moved by the witness of these brides of Christ who, in the face of the most horrific scene imaginable, not only fearlessly faced their death, but joyfully proclaimed the ‘mercy’ of the Lord?
Thus, reading and praying with the story of Blessed Teresa of St Augustine and her companions as a young seminarian, I found myself filled with hope that the Lord would grant me the gift of fortitude to overcome my fears of what might await me as a priest. Now, two years after being ordained, I find they continue to guide me with their intercession, but in a different way. In my ministry, I serve in two assignments: one as an associate in a poor, inner-city parish with majority Hispanic parishioners, and the other as the chaplain of a high school with about seven hundred students. I absolutely love my ministry as a priest and have never once regretted my vocational path, but it has certainly not been without its challenges. In my parish, I am daily confronted with extraordinary brokenness in people’s families. So many of our people’s lives have been touched by addiction, abuse, crime, marital infidelity, and divorce. In the school, my heart often aches as I meet with students who have been raised with little to no faith, battle with anxiety and depression to a degree I never could have imagined in people so young, and have already lost a sense of wonder about life.
Facing all of this on a daily basis, if I am honest, is hard. It feels as if there are waves of darkness and chaos that are so far beyond me, all of which are rooted in people turning away from God. Bearing on my shoulders the responsibility for the souls entrusted to me, I often feel inadequate and powerless. I frequently ask the Lord in prayer, ‘What is it that You are asking of me? In the midst of all this chaos and confusion, where do I even begin? What are You calling me as a priest and we as a Church to do?’ As I reread Bush’s book and once again turned to the intercession of the Blessed Carmelite martyrs, those holy women who were no strangers to darkness and chaos, brought about by the absence of God, I was drawn to the simple phrase that so captivated Mother Teresa all those years ago: ‘follow the Lamb.’
It sounds obvious, but how could I forget one of the central tenets of our Christian faith? Is not the answer always to dive deeper into the Paschal Mystery of Christ, who as the true Lamb of God offered His life to atone for our sins on the Cross and rose again to conquer the forces of darkness? My instinct is always to think, ‘okay, what do I do now?’ instead of once again plunging into the central mystery of our redemption. Mother Teresa understood this, and felt that her sisters were being called to something radical: to offer their very lives through, with, and in Christ Jesus for the redemption of their nation.
I think that I myself, along with many of us in the Church today, have somewhat lost the sense of our need for redemption and the fact that our sins must be atoned for. St John profoundly states in his first letter: ‘In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins’ (1 John 4:4). It is precisely in dying to atone for our sins that Jesus reveals the depths of God’s love for us. Not only does Christ do this for us: He also invites each and every Christian to follow Him and participate in His atoning mission, which we can see from Jesus’ numerous invitations to ‘take up our crosses’ in the Gospels.[2]
The Carmelites of Compiègne show us how offering ourselves with love, in union with Christ, is the only adequate response ‘to quell the terror’ of our world. There is no programme, law, system of government, or simple solution; the roots of the darkness and evil are rooted in the human heart. Bush beautifully articulates how ‘since the Carmelites’ sacrifice was offered in the name of their Lord and God, Jesus Christ, their sacrifice was thereby, spiritually, a mystical participation in his own offering.’[3] Despite the revolutionary government’s best efforts to eradicate the Christian faith, the tyrannical Robespierre’s reign came to an end, a mere ten days after the sisters’ sacrifice, and shortly thereafter the butchery of the guillotine would cease.
Are we not perhaps also being invited in our times to offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God, in union with the Lord Jesus? Now, most of us are not currently in a position where martyrdom is an imminent possibility. Nevertheless, we all can enter into the same dynamic of love where we ‘lay down our lives for our friends’ (cf. John 15:13) in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, however insignificant they may seem. On the human level, the heroism of those sixteen nuns, as amazing as it was, accomplished very little. Yet, united with Jesus’ saving sacrifice, it carried an infinite weight. What could this spirit of participation in Christ’s atonement accomplish in our world today if all of us Christians were to heed this call?
As I mentioned at the beginning, the story of the Blessed Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne is a beautiful one, which peels back the veil between heaven and earth to reveal God’s heart, which burns with love for humanity. By joining the sisters in ‘following the Lamb’, perhaps our world, enwrapped in darkness and error, might also come to see the beauty of God in us too?
[1] William Bush, To Quell the Terror: The True Story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 2013).
[2] To enter more deeply into this mystery, I highly recommend Margaret Turek’s recent work, Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022).
[3] Bush, op. cit.,pp. 229-30.
