The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Paris is full of Huguenots — French Protestants — who have come for the wedding of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to the Catholic Margaret of Valois. It is a political marriage designed to end decades of religious civil war. The leading Huguenot nobles are in the city.

On the night of August 23rd, Catherine de Medici and King Charles IX give the order — or do not give it and cannot stop it, the historical record is disputed — and the killing begins.

The church bells of St. Germain l'Auxerrois ring before dawn on August 24th, the feast of St. Bartholomew. The Catholic mob pours into the streets.

The killing continues for three days in Paris and spreads to the provinces over the following weeks. The number of dead has been estimated at between five thousand and thirty thousand. The streets run with blood. The Seine carries bodies.

Admiral Coligny — the most prominent Huguenot leader in France, who had survived an assassination attempt two days earlier — is killed in his bed and his body thrown from a window. The mob mutilates it.

Pope Gregory XIII orders a Te Deum sung in Rome when the news arrives. He commissions Giorgio Vasari to paint frescoes commemorating the event in the Vatican.

The frescoes are still there.

Henry of Navarre survives by converting to Catholicism. He will convert back to Protestantism, then to Catholicism again, and eventually become King Henry IV of France, issuing the Edict of Nantes that grants Huguenots limited religious freedom.

The pope sang a Te Deum. He gave thanks to God for the massacre of thousands of Christians by other Christians.

This is one of the most difficult sentences in the history of the church to read, and it must be read without looking away.

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is not the church at its worst in some abstract sense. It is specific people — a pope, a queen, a king, a mob — making specific decisions to kill specific human beings in the name of God, and then giving thanks for the killing.

The permanent lesson is not about Catholics or Protestants. It is about what happens when religious identity becomes tribal — when the other's faith marks them as the enemy rather than as a human being made in God's image.

The Huguenots killed in their beds in Paris bore the image of God. The mob that killed them bore the image of God. Both facts were invisible in the dark before dawn on the feast of St. Bartholomew.

What makes the other visible to you as a human being? And what makes them invisible?