Three days after the Church remembered the Blessed Martyrs of Compiègne, slaughtered during the French Revolution so many of us were taught to admire through sanitized slogans, Carmel and the Church turns its eyes to one of the greatest prophets of the Old Testament—Saint Elias, or Elijah as many of you know him.

The connection is real for Catholics. The sixteen women who went to the guillotine praising God on that fateful July 17, 1794 day were daughters of Carmel. Elias is honored in the Carmelite tradition as a spiritual father, the prophet of fire, the man who stood before a divided people and asked the question every age eventually has to answer: “How long halt you between two sides? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him” (3 Kings 18:21).

All that warning I make on avoiding the binary trap, and those lessons on the only true binary found in Genesis 3:15? There it is again.

God and not-God. God and Baal. Read that story. It is one of the best.

And that one line links Elias to the Blessed Martyrs of Compiègne.

LAST FRIDAY

The Martyrs of Compiègne and the Version of Liberty Catholics Were Taught to Trust

The Carmelite martyrs, more like us than the casual observer will recognize, did not live in an age of calm Catholic clarity. They lived during the French Revolution, when the State closed religious houses and succeeded in forcing Catholic life into hiding while attempting to bend the Church to a new political religion. It was a stunning precursor to much of what modern political life later normalized, and to much of what entered Catholic language through the Second Vatican Council in Rome in the 1960s.

New Advent records that before their execution, they knelt and chanted the Veni Creator, renewed their baptismal and religious vows, and then went to their deaths with holy surrender. Other traditional accounts also remember their final procession through the Church’s prayer, which is why the Divine Office belongs in this reflection. They did not answer the Revolution with a speech or a series of pamphlets. They answered it with the prayer of the Church. They followed the Lord to their own version of the Cross.

That is Elias in Carmelite form, not because their vocation looked the same as his, but because the decision was the same. These courageous, heroic women did not “halt between two sides.” They did not try to preserve a place for Christ inside the Revolution’s false liberty. They did not try to marry Christ to a revolutionary State, however salutary lawful civil order can be when it is rightly subordinated to God. It was Christ and Christ only, and if everything else didn’t fit into that, they would and did choose death.

What should trouble any Catholic is that they were not executed because they were violent or even antagonistic to peace. They were not executed because they were revolutionaries hellbent on crime and error. They were executed because they belonged to Christ in a way the revolutionary State could not tolerate, not even inside the walls of a quiet little convent.

And that is why my work will continue to express caution at similar breadcrumbs as they are dropped today. One day it will be too late to recognize and resist. That is not a call to panic or a prophecy of doom. It is a call to a return to Catholic memory. When the State, the media, universities, or even churchmen themselves begin to redefine obedience, liberty, conscience, and peace against the old Faith, Catholics should remember that these words have been weaponized before.

Indeed, Saint Elias can be so useful for Catholics right now, both in our prayer lives and as we try to recover Catholic intelligence. His story and his challenge to sinners do not allow religious ambiguity—exactly what Rome is preaching today in the way of synodality, dialogue, and tolerance—to become set in the stones. He does not hold hands and journey together with a people offering sacrifice on two altars. He does not ask Israel to be “balanced” between God and Baal.

He asks for finality—in judgment, decision, and ongoing fidelity.

Modern Catholics need that fire again.

“How long halt you between two sides?”

That question is not only for Old Testament Israel. It is for every Catholic trying to live between the true Faith and true freedom, and the modern world’s counterfeit version of both. It is for every Catholic who can see the contradictions—the audacious hypocrisies—but keeps hoping someone else will wake them up when the time is right. It is for every Catholic who knows that Christ is King but still wants to maneuver inside a system specifically built to dethrone Him.

The daughters of Carmel answered with the Veni Creator and their blood.

Their father Elias called down the fire of God.

And together, they leave the children of God with a question that will never age—If the Lord be God, follow Him.

“Elias the prophet stood up, as a fire, and his word burnt like a torch.” -Ecclesiasticus 48:1