Homily for Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit for the Commencement of the Law Term (‘The Red Mass’) at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney on 3 February 2025 by Archbishop Anthony Fisher, Archbishop of Sydney
Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, was the notorious Public Prosecutor during France’s ‘Reign of Terror’. For his outsized role in delivering thousands to the ‘National Razor,’ he earned the nickname ‘Purveyor to the Guillotine.’[1] An industrious lawyer, sympathetic to the ideals of the revolution, Fouquier was appointed Accusateur Public of the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris in 1793.[2] He ardently implemented the revolutionary laws, prosecuting cases speedily and achieving a near 100% conviction rate by trying the accused in batches, while denying them legal defence.[3] When cases were stalling or the court seemed indifferent, he’d expedite things by asking the jury if they’d “heard enough to be illuminated yet.”[4]
Following the abolition of religious orders and confiscation of ecclesiastical property under the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Mother Teresa of St Augustine, Prioress of the Discalced Carmelite Convent of Compiègne, and her sisters sought to live their vows as best they could and to offer their lives, and if needs be their deaths, for the salvation of France.[5] After being exiled from their convent and stripped of their habits, they rented apartments and lived in groups of four, attending clandestine Masses with nonjuring priests and constantly praying for peace. But eventually they were caught by the Revolutionary forces and imprisoned.
On 17 July 1794, Fouquier brought the sixteen nuns to trial, accusing them of fermenting counter-revolutionary thoughts and consorting to commit sedition. When pressed by a young nun as to what he meant by calling them ‘fanatics’, the dogged prosecutor defined the term as anyone who is too attached to “childish beliefs” and “silly religious practices”.[6] Unsurprisingly, the silly ‘fanatics’ were found guilty and sentenced to death that very day. The nuns sang hymns all the way to the scaffold and on arrival renewed their vows. The youngest novice, Constance de St Denis, was first to ascend and chanted the Laudate Dominum as her death approached. As one by one the nuns followed her, they sang the Veni Creator Spiritus with which we opened today’s Mass, which silenced the usually boistrous crowd.[7] Ten days later the great architect of the Terror, Robespierre, was himself executed, marking the waning of the Terror and, less than a year later, the Revolutionary Tribunal was itself abolished after executing its final convict: prosecutor Antoine Fouquier.
The heroic witness of the sixteen martyrs of the Carmel of Compiègne inspired Le Fort’s novel The Song at the Scaffold (1931), and Bernanos’ screenplay (1949) and Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956). Late last year Pope Francis canonised these women as saints of the Church.
In reflecting on their lives and deaths, we witness not only faith and integrity in time of persecution, but also the importance of a legal system that genuinely seeks truth and justice. That laws and legal processes should be ordered to the common good and protect the weak, rather than extinguishing enemies and advancing the interests of the comfortable, may seem obvious to us. That freedom of religion and other basic liberties should not be suspended or unjust laws made in service of ideologies seems a no-brainer: theorists, such as Augustine, Aquinas and Thomas More promoted obedience to law but judged radically unjust laws scarcely law at all.[8] Yet it has not always been obvious to all, as demonstrated by the recent spate of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, schools, businesses, homes and vehicles, and the discovery of caravan-load of explosives destined for more such terrorism, that have stained our city’s soul.
The story of the Carmelite martyrs is also an example, albeit an egregious one, of the tensions that can arise between Church and State. In today’s Gospel (Mt 22:15-21), Jesus is interrogated about paying Roman taxes, not with a view to truth or justice, but in order to trap Him into seeming either a collaborator with the Roman oppressor or an anarchist denying the legitimate authority of the state. Whichever way He leans, Jesus can’t win.
But Jesus sees through the trap of the Accusateurs Publics and ignores their simplistic binaries. “Render unto Caesar what is properly Caesar’s and to God what is properly God’s” affirms proper spheres for both politics and religion, each with its own responsibilities, principles and authorities. Temporal rulers shouldn’t play God or infringe on the sacred, including the dignity of human persons, and religious rulers shouldn’t play king or engage in worldly politics. Which is not to say “ne’er the twain shall meet” between Church and State or that the two are necessarily rivals. Here in Australia, Church and State generally make space for each other, leaving well enough alone, but collaborating where useful for the common good. Our citizens’ values, laws and customs, so much of our culture, are largely a Judeo-Christian inheritance. And the same people are at Church, synagogue or mosque at week’s end, and in parliament, court or community during the week, and must find ways to live in both worlds with integrity. To try to exclude faith from the public square in pursuit of a totalitarian secularism, or to try to subject the state to the views of one religion in pursuit of theocracy, would be to fail in respect for some part of the human good and some members of the human community.
But when the law allows space both for believers and unbelievers to pursue truth, beauty and goodness, when legitimate authority recognises the good of religion and its place in educating citizens in virtue and in enabling their charitable contributions to the polity, when believers are well protected from those who would harm or silence them, then society is strengthened, the Carmels will be safe and the synagogues also. Then can those who make and apply our laws join Mr Justice Isaiah this morning (Isa 1:10,16-20) in declaring: “Take your crimes and torts out of my sight. Cease doing evil and learn to do good. Seek justice, help the oppressed, protect orphans, plead for widows.”
[1] Alphonse Dunoyer, The Public Prosecutor of the Terror: Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, translated by A.W. Evans (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914), 115.
[2] Eric Hazan, A People’s History of the French Revolution (London: Verso, 2017), 228
[3] M.A. Thiers, The History of the French Revolution: Vol III (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1843), 62.
[4] Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chroncile of the French Revolution (UK: Penguin, 1998), 677-8.
[5] William Bush, To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne Guillotined July 17, 1794 (Washington D.C: ICS Publications, 1999), 116.
[6] Bush, To Quell the Terror, 183. See also Edwin Barron, Refractory Men, Fanatical Women: Fidelity to Conscience during the French Revolution (Gracewing, 1992), 101-104; Warren Carrol, The Cross and the Guillotine (Front Royal VA: Christendom Press, 1991).
[7] Bush, To Quell the Terror, 208; “These 16 Nuns were guillotined in the French Revolution. Now the Pope has declared them saints,” The Conversation 13 January 2025.
[8] See for example Augustine, On Free the Choice of the Will, 1.5.11.33- 1.5.12.37; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 96, a.4.