(1794)
For over a hundred years, the Ursuline Sisters maintained a convent and religious school in Valenciennes in northeast France. When the Revolution of 1789 suppressed religious houses, the sisters moved to a sister house across the border in Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). When the Austrians subsequently occupied Valenciennes, the sisters felt it was safe to return and resume their life. But then fortune changed. The French retook the town, and the Ursulines were charged as illegal émigrés who were running religious schools without permission. The sisters were arrested and imprisoned. In their trial, they openly admitted that they had returned to practice and share the Catholic religion with their neighbors, and they were sentenced to death.
Eleven sisters were beheaded in the public square. Whereas the execution of counterrevolutionaries was often greeted with jeering, in this case the crowd was silent. The only sound, interrupted by the falling blade of the guillotine, was from the sisters themselves, who sang the Litany of Our Lady.
These Ursuline nuns were beatified as martyrs in 1920. They included a lay sister, Cordule Barré, who had escaped arrest but stepped out of the crowd to join her sisters on the tumbril and was executed along with the rest. They were among the last victims of the Terror.
“We die for the faith of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.” —Blessed Mary Clotilde Paillot, Mother Superior
