A Homily for the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Daniel 12:1-3 Hebrews 10:11-14, 18 Mark 13:24-32
They murdered the archbishop. In May 1871, the Commune of Paris was surrounded by its enemies and desperate. It had been born of desperation.
The French Emperor Louis Napoleon III had precipitously launched and lost a war against Bismarck’s Prussia. A republican government, headed by Adolphe Thiers, followed the downfall of the second empire, but it was unclear whether France might again become a monarchy. In one tumultuous century, the country had had two kings, from the rival houses of Bourbon and Orleans, and two emperors. How long would a second republic last? That’s why ordinary citizens had followed the national guard and rioted in Paris, establishing an independent commune.
Like many a murder, this one had not been planned; it was not even originally intended. The leadership in Paris had taken Archbishop Georges Darboy hostage, hoping to exchange him for their own imprisoned leader, Louis Auguste Blanqui. But the republican government in Versailles had refused to negotiate, and now their troops had breached the walls of Paris.
Tens of thousands of lives had been uselessly lost, first to the Prussians and then in civil strife. Everyone seemed to be seeking vindication. Someone had to pay for all the senseless slaughter! Someone had to stop the wicked from triumphing. Sadly no one could agree who the real enemy was: the Prussians? The imperialists? The monarchists? The republicans at the gate?
Paris and its people wanted vindication, even though their hostage was not a reactionary royalist. On the contrary, Archbishop Darboy was as liberal and reforming as one might reasonably expect an archbishop of Paris to be. He had opposed Pope Pius IX’s definition of papal infallibility, losing a red hat because of it, and he had remained in Paris during both the Prussian and the republican sieges. He could have easily fled with other monarchists. Neither Rome nor Versailles went to extraordinary lengths to save him.
Sebastian Smee writes in Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism(2024):
The firing squad was made up of young volunteers, most of them doubtless eager to avenge fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends who had been killed or wounded by the Versaillais. Some were still teenagers. Naïve and vulnerable, they were now being ordered to kill defenseless men of the cloth.
Lined up against a wall with other clerics, the archbishop pointed skyward and cried: “My God! My God!” He knelt to pray with his companions and then blessed them. The command was given to shoot.
There immediately followed two ear-splitting volleys in quick succession. When the smoke cleared, dismayingly, Darboy remained alive. Felled by the first bullets, he got back to his feet once, then a second time, then—incredibly—a third time.
Vindication is harder than it first appears. The archbishop was finally felled by a shot to his head. “To make sure of it, the spooked men in the firing squad fell on his body with their bayonets, repeatedly piercing his chest.”
How comforting the Jews, suffering under Greek domination, must have found these words of the prophet Daniel, promising God’s own vindication at the hands of their nation’s angelic guardian:
At that time there shall arise
Michael, the great prince,
guardian of your people;
it shall be a time unsurpassed in distress
since nations began until that time (12:1).
The desire to be vindicated is as old as history itself because history cannot help but create winners and losers; history allows the wicked to have their way with the righteous. Who among us has not known some wrong, experienced some injustice, and not longed for the day when it would be set right?
We can and should always seek the right, as we are given it to see. Even then we must scrupulously question our own integrity. When the sinful seek vindication, they inevitably create more harm, do more injustice. They only cause the wheel of hatred to spin faster.
When seeking the right passes over to revenge, we seize what belongs to God alone, to his own entrance into history. True vindication is a quality of heaven, not of earth.
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake;
some shall live forever,
others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.
But the wise shall shine brightly
like the splendor of the firmament,
and those who lead the many to justice
shall be like the stars forever (Dn 12:2-3).
What happens within history cannot ultimately be adjudicated by history alone. It can only be judged by the one who sets history on its course and who will soon enough call it into account. History is ours. It was given to us by bequest. Vindication belongs to the giver, to God alone.
