Pope Francis Honors the Carmelites of Compiègne

The news was made public on December 18, 2024 by the Press Office of the Holy See. Pope Francis, during the audience granted to the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints – Cardinal Marcello Semeraro – decided to extend to the universal Church the cult of sixteen Carmelite martyrs of the Revolution, hitherto honored, since their beatification by Pope Saint Pius X, in several dioceses of France.

In 1792, after the deposition of King Louis XVI and the closing of the last convents, the Carmelites of Compiègne occupied houses in the city, in Paris. It was at this time that the superior, Mother Thérèse of Saint-Augustin, suggested to the sisters of her community that they offer their lives for the salvation of France.

On June 27, 1794, the nuns were arrested, tried expeditiously, and sentenced to death for having “continued their consecrated life” and having been guilty of “sympathies towards the monarchy.”

Georges Bernanos, in his famous Dialogue of the Carmelites, recounts their last moments, notably when the sinister cart takes them away, dressed in their white robes and coats and singing the Veni Creator. After being tortured, their bodies were thrown into one of the common graves dug in the sandy ground of a garden belonging to the former convent of Picpus.

Beatified by Pius X on May 27, 1906, it was thus a few days before the 2024 Christmas holidays that Pope Francis signed their decree of “equipollent canonization.”  The Church often takes its time in matters of equipollent canonization: thus St. Wenceslas, Duke of Bohemia and martyr in 929 saw his equipollent canonization decreed in 1729.