The faith of our fathers - Carmel Apologetics

""flELIGIOUS PERSECUTION . 299Pope Gregory XIIL, to whom also an envoy wassent, acting on this garbled information, ordered aTe Deum to be sung, and a commemorativemedal to be struck off in thanksgiving to God, notfor the massacre, of which he was utterly ignorant,but for the preservation of the French King froman untimely and violent death, and of the Frenchnation from the horrors of a civil war.Sismondi, a Protestant historian, tells us that thePope s nuncio in Paris was purposely kept in ignorance of the designs of Charles ;and Ranke, in hisHistory of the Civil Wars, informs us that Charlesand his mother suddenly left Paris in order to avoidan interview with the Pope s legate, who arrivedsoon after the massacre; their guilty consciencefearing, no doubt, a rebuke from the messenger ofthe Vicar of Christ, from whom the real facts werenot long concealed.4. It is scarcely necessary to vindicate the innocence of the Bishops and clergy of France in thistransaction, as no author, how hostile soever to theChurch, has ever, tomy knowledge, accused themof any complicity in the heinous massacre.On the contrary, they used their best efforts inarresting the progress of the assailants, in preventing more bloodshed, and in protecting the lives ofthe fugitives. More than three hundred Calvinistswere sheltered from the assassins by taking refugein the house of the Archbishop of Lyons. TheBishops of Lisieux, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and of other