Thought for St. Bartholomew

A little after midnight on the 24th of August, 1572 began the famed massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, in which some 2,000 Huguenots were killed by the mob in Paris alone. Last week, in hundreds of Roman Catholic churches throughout France, special Masses were said to ask forgiveness for this crime against fellow Christians, and many Protestant ministers also took note of the occasion to ask their congregations to forgive and forget.

This observance of St. Bartholomew's Day has grown year by year since 1937, when it was started by Abbe Paul Couturier, an ex-schoolteacher who had found his vocation as priest at the age of 56. Until his death in 1953, grey, scholarly Abbe Couturier devoted himself to encouraging understanding and cooperation among churches. He once succeeded in persuading a Catholic missionary magazine to devote an entire issue to the work of Protestant missions.

In the current issue of the Christian Century the Rev. Charles Granville Hamilton of Booneville Episcopal Mission in Mississippi urges Protestants to commemorate St. Bartholomew's Day with penitence for their own sins against brother Christians. "The state church of England," he suggests, "might ask forgiveness of the free churches for its persecution of them, and the state churches of Lutheran persuasion might confess how far they went astray in their suppression of Anabaptists. The Church of Scotland might contemplate its pressure against dissenting minorities, and the churches of South Africa their sins of the past towards others. New England Congregationalists might pray pardon for their treatment of Quakers, and Friends for their refusal to protect the Scots on the frontier. Virginia Anglicans might ponder whether their failure 350 years after Jamestown to number more than a fraction of the Baptists and Methodists in that state is not due to their reluctance to admit tyranny before 1776 and superciliousness since. The Methodists and Baptists who set community patterns which discriminated against others might repent of their covert persecutions. And we all might repent of our sneers at Pentecostalists . . ."

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