CNS runs a story today that looks back:

On a melancholy bend in France’s Atlantic coast, a narrow causeway leads across choppy gray-green waters to a low-lying deserted island.

Ile Madame, in the River Charente estuary, is not mentioned in guidebooks, and few tourists venture here. For local Catholics, though, it remains a symbol of the violent anti-clericalism that erupted in their country more than two centuries ago.

"It’s a small, desolate place — but it speaks eloquently about testimony and suffering," said Msgr. Yves Guiochet, vicar general of La Rochelle Diocese. "At a time of secularism, when most people aren’t interested in the church, it’s a reminder of how to live faithfully as Christians, while also maintaining an attitude of respect and reconciliation to the society around us."

In April 1794, during the French Revolution, 829 detained Catholic priests, ages 28-77, were stripped of their breviaries and crucifixes and crammed aboard a pair of slave ships anchored off Rochefort to await deportation to Guyana.

Half the priests detained were diocesan priests from 35 departments of France, but some were religious, including Cistercians, Carmelites and Capuchins. Some had been marched 500 miles to reach the Charente mud flats. There was little food, and no medicine or doctors. Within nine months, two-thirds of the priests would be dead.