The Holy Martyrs of Avignonet

Here then are the two camps in presence. On one side, a few weak, poor men, without weapons, aged in penance and prayer, and fulfilling with simplicity a perilous and arduous mission with which the Pope and their king had invested them.

On the other side, a hundred well-armed, seasoned men, who slip in furtively, like traitors or cowards, under the cover of darkness, for the execution of an infernal project, concerted clandestinely and which is only to obtain from success the lugubrious brilliance that they barely dare to hope for.

An army of assassins for eleven victims!

Raymond d'Alfaro, a traitor to his master, unless he had received secret orders from him, puts himself at the head of the band. He leads the assassins into the great hall of the castle where the inquisitors and their associates were located. To reach their victims, the assassins had to cross several rooms. The doors being closed, they are broken down with a crash. Hearing the sinister noises being made in the castle, the violent and repeated blows that were felling the doors, the inquisitors understood that their final hour had come. None of them, however, thought to flee. They knelt down, intoned the Te Deum, and, in this posture often taken by the Martyrs of the first centuries delivered to ferocious beasts, they awaited their executioners, happy to reach heaven by the path of bloody immolation.

The heretics rushed in, striking their peaceful enemies with envy, some with axes, others with spears and knives.

The work was easy, for no one thought to defend themselves. The two nuncios Fortanier and Aymar, having rushed to the aid of their masters, were thrown from the windows.

Raymond d'Alfaro, who was dressed in a white doublet, struck the first blow; he boasted of it later by saying that he was the first to have dealt a club blow to the inquisitor. It was necessary that the master of the house give the signal. This is how the sectarians knew how to observe the laws of hospitality.

Despite the secrecy with which they had surrounded themselves and the silence of their nocturnal invasion, or perhaps because some of those who were locked in the place had managed to escape, the terrible news suddenly spread through the city. The alarm was given, and the Catholics of Avignonet flocked to the castle. They managed, at the peril of their lives, to free some of these noble victims whom they carried in haste to the parish church, hoping that at least the sanctity of the place would stop the fury of the heretics. But the altars themselves no longer had anything sacred for them. They abandoned the mutilated and bloody corpses of those they had just immolated and ran after the victims they feared to see escape. In the temple their fury redoubled, and the silence of the night and the contemplation of the holy place were disturbed at the same time by their cries of rage. Guillaume Arnaud of Montpellier and Étienne of Narbonne fell under their blows, flooding the floor of the sanctuary with their martyr blood.

Then the heretics returned to the castle where everything was searched, looted, and broken.

After the expedition, each one described, with the calm of satisfied rage, the way in which they had used their weapons. An Albigensian tore the tongue from Guil laume de Montpelli Pierre de Mirepoix Heretic who displayed great cruelty toward bodies. er, and Pierre de Mirepoix reproached the murderers for not having brought him the skull of that inquisitor. He wanted to make a cup out of it for his feasts.

After such a glorious expedition, it was only right to proceed with the sharing of the spoils. Raymond d'Alfaro gave, according to his promise, the palfrey of Raymond Scriptor to Guillaume de Plaigne, then he went to tell those of his confederates who had not been able to attend and who, no doubt, were keeping watch in the surroundings, everything that had happened, and dismissed them.

This skillful man had, moreover, taken his measures so well that if the massacre of Avignonet had failed, another trap awaited the inquisitors. He had posted twenty horsemen in ambush between Castelnaudary and Saint-Martin to kill them as they passed.

God willed to illustrate the life and holiness of His martyrs through miracles. On the night of the massacre, a woman who was in labor, three leagues from Avignonet, saw the sky open, a great number of ladders descending from it, and much blood shed all around. This woman, forgetting her pain and taking pleasure in contemplating the brightness with which those who climbed the rungs of the ladder were clothed, gave birth very happily. — The same brightness was seen by shepherds who were guarding their flocks in the field s. — James, King of A Jacques, roi d'Aragon King of Aragon who supported and participated in the foundation of the order. ragon, who was at that time at war against the Saracens, and who was keeping watch in his tent, saw a brightness descend from the sky. Turning to his officers, he said to them: "Know that at this very hour, Our Lord is performing some great wonder regarding His servants." — At the Dominican monastery of Barcelona, several brothers had the same vision. — A devout person from Carcassonne, having heard the martyrdom of the inquisitors recounted, dedicated himself to them and was immediately cured of an illness that had tormented him for two years. — Raymond Carbonnier, who was one of the victims of the ambush at Avignonet, saw, a few days before the event, a beautiful gold crown enriched with precious stones swaying above the castle. He recounted this vision to the prior of the monastery of Prouille and to other brothers. One of the religious who was to succumb then said: "Know that shortly we shall die for the honor of the Catholic faith." — The day before, a devout woman from Toulouse went to find one of the Dominican Fathers of the convent in that city and said to him: "This morning, while the religious were singing Mass, I fell asleep in the church, and it seemed to me that I saw the crucifix which is at the entrance of the choir shed a great quantity of blood. I was very surprised by this. Then the crucifix spoke to me thus: Go, my daughter, find the prior of the monastery, and point out to him the place where the bodies of the Martyrs must be deposited." The place marked was to the right of the crucifix that had made the revelation.

It is easy to understand the vivid impression that the cowardly ambush of Avignonet produced in all minds.

"One cannot deny," says an author not suspect in such matters!, "that this murder is atrocious in itself; alas! what would become of society if men took revenge through such attacks?"

The Church itself was moved by it, and Pope Gregory IX having died, the cardinals of the holy Roman Church wrote letters of consolation to the Dominicans during the vacancy of the See.

The precious remains of our Martyrs, abandoned to the beasts and birds of the air, were piously collected by the Preaching Friars and transported to their church in Toulouse. Those of the Friars Minor were l ikewise Toulouse Episcopal see of Erembert. buried in the church of their Order, and those of Raymond Scriptor and his clerk in the cloister of Saint-Étienne in the same city.

The blood of the Martyrs shed on the flagstones of the church of Avignonet, pure and sacred as it was, had nonetheless been a canonical defilement for the holy place, which henceforth made the celebration of the holy offices within its walls impossible.

The church, struck by interdict, remained closed for forty years, and one had to be content, for the celebration of worship, with a church belonging to the Benedictines, dependent on the abbey of Saint-Papoul.

However, the heresy was gradually dying out, thanks, no doubt, to the intercession of the Martyrs who, following the example of their divine Master and Saint Stephen, prayed in heaven for their executioners.

Thus, the parish of Avignonet, entirely converted to Catholicism, understood that it was finally time to no longer let the anathema weigh upon the holy place.

A deputation was sent to the Sove reign Pontif Alexandre IV Pope who summoned Albert to Rome. f Alexander IV, in order to beg His Holiness to lift the interdict. This grace was granted on the first Tuesday of the month of June 1283.

At the moment when the Pope lifted the interdict, the bells of the parish church of Avignonet, which had not been heard for forty years, began to ring by themselves and continued thus for a whole day and a whole night: the fact is attested by a declaration of the inhabitants of Avignon collected in 1293.

This prodigy is also recorded in a bull of Paul III Paul III Pope who approved the Somascan Order in 1540. from the year 1537 and in a notarial act of January 29, 1676.

This bull of Paul III, dated from Rome, informs us that the church of Avignonet already bore the title of Our Lady of Miracles or of Gaulège: we shall see further below where this glorious appellation comes from.

But it is not only the spontaneous ringing of the bells that was heard for a whole day and a whole night, which is recorded in this precious historical document: it also speaks of the prodigious opening of the doors of the same church, closed for forty years. They also opened by themselves, despite the numerous iron locks with which they were armed.

The original of the bull of Paul III is still piously preserved in the archives of the church of Avignonet where, even today, everyone can see it.

One of the great errors of the Albigens Albigeois Religious movement opposed to the Catholic Church in the south of France. ians consisted in refusing the august Mary the title of Mother of God: they taught that the Word had taken on only a fantastic flesh in the Virgin. This error, both doctrinal and historical, already several times fought and anathematized by the Church, attacked the glory of Mary—of which God has always shown Himself so jealous—too directly not to cause the unrecognized truth to burst forth through miracles.

It was fitting that the glory of Mary should not be separated from that of her faithful servants: she wished to have particular honors and a special altar on this land that had drunk their blood.

Shortly after the rehabilitation of the holy temple, the inhabitants of Avignonet found a magnificent statue of the Virgin at the entrance of their church.

What artist had conceived and executed this beautiful work? What hand had placed it there? No one knew. People had passed a hundred times a day, and for many long years, over the spot occupied by the marvelous image; nothing had appeared, and, all of a sudden, astonished gazes encountered an object that attracted and charmed them. This sudden apparition was for the pious Christians of the region like a warning from heaven. It was evident that Mary wished to be honored where the most abominable blasphemies had been vomited against her, and to enhance by a miracle the merit of the intrepid defenders of her cult and her divine maternity.

The heart of the Mother spoke to the heart of the children, and this mysterious and sweet language was understood. The institution of an annual feast was requested to perpetuate the memory of the miracle, and the solemnity of Our Lady of Miracles, approved by several sovereign Pontiffs and enriched with indulgences, is still celebrated on the first Tuesday of June each year.

It is indeed a feast of atonement, and as the massacre had taken place under the veils of night, a penitential procession travels, in the evening on the eve of the feast, by the light of torches, through the main streets of the town. The image of the august Mother of God is carried in triumph. Sacred chants resound in the silence of the night as if to stifle the blasphemies vomited by the sectarians during the horrible night of May 28, 1242.

"The next day, a ceremony remarkable for its antiquity and its significance attracts the attention of spectators. One sees people of all conditions holding a candle in their hand and traveling on their knees the space that exists between the place of the miraculous statue, at the back of the church, and the chancel railing, opposite the painting of the high altar, which represents the glorification of the holy Martyrs. Once there, these people finish their arduous journey by kissing a small image of the Virgin that the priest presents to them. This act bears the name of Vow. It constitutes a double reparation: one toward Mary, horribly blasphemed by the Albigensians, the other toward the blessed Martyrs whose blood was shed so cruelly in this very place. The first converts committed themselves to this act of atonement in honor of the Blessed Virgin and her servants. It has been nearly six hundred years that their children have been faithful in fulfilling this heart of their ancestors."

The attention of the Church turned with tender solicitude to the glorious remains of our Martyrs. From the earliest times following their death, the Sovereign Pontiffs gave the title of Martyrs to these courageous defenders of the faith, and the people themselves, perhaps sensing the judgment of the Church, hastened to honor and invoke them as such. God seemed to ratify this pious impulse, and striking miracles were accomplished at their tombs and at the scene of their martyrdom. Contemporary historians, such as Étienne de Salagnac, and later Bernard de la Guionie (14th century) and Saint Antoninus of Florence (15th century), echoed these wonders. The brush of Fra Angelico da Fiesole surrounded th eir memory with a halo Fra Angelico da Fiesole Famous painter who depicted the martyrs. of glory and genius, and one can still see in the chapter house of the convent of San Marco in Florence, the Blessed Bernard of Roquefort, represented with rays of glory around his head and a palm in his hand. These are the attributes consecrated from time immemorial to the Martyrs of the faith.

Very ancient manuscripts, religiously preserved in the convent of the Friars Preachers, prescribed that the religious recite every evening, after mental prayer, the antiphon of the Martyrs with the proper verse and prayer.

A ceremony even more touching was performed every year on the eve of the anniversary of their death. The entire convent would go in procession into the presence of the holy relics, and there, according to the custom adopted by the Order for the veneration of the relics of the Saints, they would greet them with a profound bow, then sing the antiphon: Gloria tibi Trinitas, followed by this other antiphon: Christi pia gratia sanctos sublimavit quos Patris Ordo Dominici propagavit, nos eorum meritis petimus juvari, atque suis precibus Deo commendari. All this was followed by the corresponding verses and two Collects chanted by the prior: one for the Holy Trinity, the other for the Saints of the Order of Saint Dominic. The Reverend Dominican Fathers of Toulouse continue to render to the blessed Martyrs of Avignonet the cult consecrated by the preceding centuries. Several lamps, maintained by the pious generosity of the faithful, burn continually before the painting that represents their martyrdom. Signal favors have been obtained in recent times through their powerful intercession.

As for the two Franciscans, Étienne de Narbonne and Raymond de Carbonnier, their bodies were, immediately after the massacre, transported and buried in the great church of their Order, where they rested under the altar of the chapel of Saint Joseph until the year 1619. At that date, they were visited by the Very Reverend Father A. Messana, General of the Order, and moved to the two sides of the said chapel. Above each tomb, one could read an inscription traced in gold letters on a black marble plaque embedded in the wall, three feet above the ground.

A very old painting, which in 1700 was already more than three hundred years old, represented the massacre of our Martyrs. Golden rays illuminated the heads of the figures, and one could see Angels descending from heaven, carrying in their hands crowns of flowers and palms destined for the Martyrs.

Things remained this way until the Revolution of '93. But in that era of upheaval and ruin, the temples were pilla ged; the chapels Révolution de 93 Period during which the saint's relics were hidden and lost. for the most part demolished; the altars broken; the holy tombs profaned, and today we no longer know where to find the sacred relics before which our fathers knelt for six centuries.

The Reverend Dominican Fathers of the convent of Saint-Romain in Toulouse, provided with all the necessary authorizations for this purpose, have carried out excavations in their former church, but all their searches have been fruitless to this day.

Histoire générale de l'église de Toulouse, by M. Valette; Histoire des Martyrs d'Avignonet, by M. Vaissette; Biographie toulousaine; Acta Sanctorum, for May 29.