{"id":4966,"date":"2006-10-27T10:16:20","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/speaking-of-france.html"},"modified":"2006-10-27T10:16:20","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:16:20","slug":"speaking-of-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/speaking-of-france.html","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of France"},"content":{"rendered":"

CNS runs a story today that looks back:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

On a melancholy bend in France’s Atlantic coast, a narrow causeway leads across choppy gray-green waters to a low-lying deserted island.<\/p>\n

Ile Madame, in the River Charente estuary, is not mentioned in guidebooks, and few tourists venture here. For local Catholics, though, it remains a symbol of the violent anti-clericalism that erupted in their country more than two centuries ago.<\/p>\n

"It’s a small, desolate place — but it speaks eloquently about testimony and suffering," said Msgr. Yves Guiochet, vicar general of La Rochelle Diocese. "At a time of secularism, when most people aren’t interested in the church, it’s a reminder of how to live faithfully as Christians, while also maintaining an attitude of respect and reconciliation to the society around us."<\/p>\n

In April 1794, during the French Revolution, 829 detained Catholic priests, ages 28-77, were stripped of their breviaries and crucifixes and crammed aboard a pair of slave ships anchored off Rochefort to await deportation to Guyana.<\/p>\n

Half the priests detained were diocesan priests from 35 departments of France, but some were religious, including Cistercians, Carmelites and Capuchins. Some had been marched 500 miles to reach the Charente mud flats. There was little food, and no medicine or doctors. Within nine months, two-thirds of the priests would be dead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CNS runs a story today that looks back: On a melancholy bend in France’s Atlantic coast, a narrow causeway leads across choppy gray-green waters to a low-lying deserted island. Ile Madame, in the River Charente estuary, is not mentioned in guidebooks, and few tourists venture here. For local Catholics, though, it remains a symbol of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSpeaking of France - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/speaking-of-france.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Speaking of France - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"CNS runs a story today that looks back: On a melancholy bend in France’s Atlantic coast, a narrow causeway leads across choppy gray-green waters to a low-lying deserted island. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}