Counter Revolution In The Vendee

Clerical disgrace symbolic of democracy in crisis

EDMOND GRACE

OPINION:  Decline in respect and trust in the Catholic Church has produced a dangerous vacuum

THE CLERICAL sex abuse crisis continues to be a source of grief. Many are angry at the injustice done and they view the church with revulsion. Others grieve from a sense of shame and they too experience a form of revulsion – better known as guilt.

Revulsion is an instinctive reaction to that which humiliates us. We are frozen into self-protective mode and we want to flee or, if that is not possible, to attack and destroy. This helps short-term survival but, in the long run, it leaves us fixated and unable to adapt.

Certain realities are clear. First, children were violated by Catholic priests and religious. Second, this abuse was covered up at leadership level within the church. Third, the damage done is a long way from being remedied. People are suspicious and no amount of apologies and new structures will rebuild damaged trust, without some unquestionably personal gesture.

In May 2010 Pope Benedict described the damage being done to the church by the sex abuse crisis as “truly terrifying”. He was standing in front of a television camera in the confined space of an aircraft cabin and talking into a microphone. His focus on his own fear, rather than then on the victims, could be seen as self-centred. But the fact that he was speaking directly from his own vulnerability makes what he said unquestionably personal.

On a flight to Lisbon, in May 2010, he told the world that he was terrified by “the sin inside the church”. It is one thing to be afraid and to act in a manner dictated by fear. To acknowledge that fear in public, however, is quite different.

Such a gesture only makes sense as the result of a decision to ask for help. This gesture – unprecedented for its public and informal manner – could help us to move beyond revulsion and shame in relation to the Catholic Church.

If there is to be any significant response to this gesture it will have to be by people of global stature who live with the possibility of losing it. They alone would be in a position to convince the Pope that they have a practical insight into the challenge faced, not just by him, but by his office.

There are people in this country who are part of an international network of current and former political office holders. They bring to that network the experience of a country that has a unique heritage of democratic innovation and whose contribution to the church throughout the world is inextricably bound up with its international standing.

The Harvest: Anti-Religious Illiberalism of Revolutionary France

Davies describes the French Revolution, when early constitutional reformers were replaced by waves of ever more radical revolutionaries. Within a few years the radicals were tearing apart Catholicism in France. A new calendar was developed without Sundays, priests and bishops were forced to swear allegiance to an anti-clerical constitution, Church property was nationalised and religious orders destroyed. Disobedient priests were executed or deported, and thousands of them fled France.

In some parts of France, religious peasants became ever more upset with the anti-religious turn of the new government. Gangs of 'urban republicans' blundered into rural areas to loot churches, while the state enacted conscription laws which forced Catholic peasants 'to die for an atheist Republic which they had never wanted in the first place'. A counter-revolution emerged in the Vendée to the west of France armed with 'scythes, pitchforks, and fowling-pieces'. The government's response was genocidal. A French general reported to the government in 1793:

The Vendée is no more... I have buried it in the woods and marshes of Savenay... According to your orders, I have trampled their children beneath our horses' feet; I have massacred their women, so they will no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all. The roads are sown with corpses. At Savenay, brigands are arriving all the time claiming to surrender, and we are shooting them non-stop... Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment.

Social origins of dictatorship and democracy, lord and peasant in the making of the modern world

The counterrevolution in the Vendée, towards Tilly's new approach

Rethinking France, Les Lieux De Memoire, Space

Chouannerie and counter-revolution, puisaye, the princes and the British government in the 1790s

Guerrilla conflict before the Cold War