The closure of a religious house in Western Europe is rarely a remarkable event nowadays. The recently announced closure of the Carmel of Compiègne in Jonquières is a little different. This small community is known to Catholics throughout the world thanks to the sisters with whom they share not only a charism but a history and a name: the sixteen martyrs of Compiègne guillotined by France’s First Republic in July 1794, little more than a week before the Reign of Terror crashed to an end with the death of Robespierre.

The original Compiègne Carmel, which became the property of the French state the year following the sisters’ execution, no longer exists; since 1994, the site has been marked with a plaque. The sisters’ bodies were deposited in a deep, unmarked pit in the Picpus Cemetery together with those of the other criminals guillotined that day. The Jonquières house preserves a small number of objects and documentary sources related to their martyrdom. Many if not most Catholics who know the story of the Compiègne Carmel and its sixteen martyrs know it not through these historical landmarks and sources but only as mediated through art, especially the Dialogues des Carmélites, or Dialogue of the Carmelites, the title given successively to a screenplay (only posthumously published as a theatrical script by Georges Bernanos), the opera by Francis Poulenc, a film by R. L. Bruckberger, and Gertrud von le Fort’s novella Die Letzte am Schafott, translated into English as The Song at the Scaffold, from which Bernanos originally took his inspiration.

These works are hardly second class. But as we lose another flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar connection to the real and unfictionalized Compiègne martyrs, it is perhaps helpful to reflect on the bare historical facts. When we start to follow the trail of these facts, we soon find ourselves far from the suburbs of Paris and in (of all places) the north of England, confronted with a question that no novella or screenplay or opera can answer for us: how did the story of a group of French Carmelite martyrs come to be so intimately tied up in the story of a community of English Benedictines? The answer is found in a detail of the martyrs’ story often left out of fictional interpretations.

The Carmelites had spent the three weeks preceding their execution detained in a former convent in the center of Compiègne. Prohibited by law from wearing the monastic habit, during their imprisonment they wore secular clothes. Eventually they received permission to wash these clothes and, lacking anything else to wear while the laundry was soaking, had no choice but to temporarily put back on the Carmelite habits which they had brought with them and carefully preserved throughout their time of imprisonment. This was the state in which the authorities found the nuns when they were seized and taken to Paris for execution. And so the Carmelites of Compiègne went to their deaths not wearing secular clothes as the authorities had planned but instead clad in the visible signs of their religious consecration.

This “delicate attention on the part of Providence,” as one monastic historian puts it, is what connects the story of these Carmelite martyrs to that of the English Benedictines. For the Carmelites were not the only consecrated women detained in the Compiègne prison in the summer of 1794. With them were the nuns of the Abbey of Our Lady of Consolation in Cambrai, a Benedictine house founded in the seventeenth century by the great-great-granddaughter of Saint Thomas More. Though located in a French city, Our Lady of Consolation was thoroughly English: a monastery of the English Benedictine Congregation in which Englishwomen could live a contemplative existence of a kind rendered impossible by the state persecution of the Church in their home country. The Benedictines of Cambrai had been taken from their monastery and detained in Compiègne before the Carmelites arrived. One of their number, Dame Ann Teresa Partington, O.S.B. (professed nuns of the English Benedictine Congregation are properly called “Dame”), later wrote an eyewitness account of their time of imprisonment, A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray, which later became significant documentary evidence in the Carmelites’ beatification process in the early 1900s.

The Benedictines of Cambrai were not called to the same fate as their fellow prisoners, however. After the execution of the Carmelites and the fall of Robespierre, the imprisoned nuns endured a harsh and near-fatal winter in the Compiègne prison. Then, in the spring of 1795, they applied for and near-miraculously obtained passports to return to England—on the condition that they leave immediately. Unable to travel through France in their habits, they wore the secular clothes which the Carmelites had left behind in the laundry.

The English Benedictines were fully aware of the significance of this final gift from their Carmelite sisters. “The old clothes which before appeared of small value were so much esteemed by us that we thought ourselves unworthy to wear them,” wrote Dame Ann Teresa. “But forced by necessity, we put them on, and those clothes constituted the greatest part of the mean apparel which we had on at our return to England. We still keep them—a few articles excepted, which we have given to particular friends.”

These relics of the Carmelite martyrs are kept by the nuns of Cambrai, now the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, to this day. Excerpts from Dame Ann Teresa’s account of the nuns’ return to England can be found in a history of the Stanbrook community, In a Great Tradition: Tribute to Dame Laurentia McLachlan. Its author is the monastic historian mentioned above: Dame Felicitas Corrigan, O.S.B., a remarkable figure in her own right. Dame Felicitas traces the history of the Stanbrook nuns from their seventeenth-century origins in Cambrai to the death of their abbess Dame Laurentia McLachlan, famously described by George Bernard Shaw as “an enclosed nun with an unenclosed mind,” in 1953. When it comes to the story of her sisters’ expulsion from revolutionary France, she writes as both a level-headed chronicler of events and the fiercely, and justly, proud beneficiary of these women’s perseverance and sacrifice (though she cannot help but note in passing that “one is tempted to wish that Lady Abbess Lucy Blyde had not been so generous in her gifts” of Carmelite relics to “particular friends.”)

The individual humanity of these nuns, blurred by the passage of time, is carefully restored and preserved by Dame Felicitas. She records that Carmelite martyrs “embraced each other” and “waved affectionate farewells to their Benedictine sisters” as they left the prison and “went to death singing hymns.” Their Benedictine sisters, meanwhile, landed “ragged and penniless at Dover in May, 1795,” destitute yet hopeful for the future. Dame Felicitas ends her chapter on the sisters’ escape to England with touching straightforwardness: the nuns of Cambrai “had simply come home.”

Intentionally or not, what Dame Felicitas is describing here is the development of two new communities. On one hand we have the Benedictines of Cambrai landing on the shores of England to build a new life in their old land. On the other we have the Carmelites of Compiègne entering Heaven together, with the determination of a postulant walking through the enclosure doors for the first and last time, singing the one hundred seventeenth Psalm: Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes. This was the Psalm Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the foundresses who took her vision to France, would customarily sing to mark the foundation of a new Carmel.

The consecrated religious life, and in particular the enclosed monastic life, is often thought of as something staid, uneventful, and unchanging. How quickly it must become a shield against the challenges and responsibilities which others face daily in the world beyond the enclosure walls! But these two communities, brought together by providence’s kind hand in the laundry of a makeshift prison, remind us that consecrated life both demands and provides an inner determination to face what sometimes seems unfaceable; to “follow the Lamb, once sacrificed and now alive, wherever he goes,” as John Paul II put it, even if it is into a future which seems frighteningly dangerous and obscure.

Our ongoing call to spiritual reform and renewal is one which none of us can shirk. For most of us, it will be lived out only in the Chapter room and in the depths of our own heart. We would do well to remember that our predecessors were prepared to follow that call across national borders and to the foot of the guillotine, and ask for the same grace of fortitude which it pleased the Lord to give them.

But there is one particular aspect of this fortitude that resonates with us in the Church today. “Human nature at any time can only suffer to a certain point,” observes Dame Felicitas, writing of the Benedictine nuns who returned to England in 1795, “and their sufferings were such that Dame Agnes Robinson . . . trembled from head to foot for the rest of her life, and even the youngest nuns returned to England looking like aged women, shattered with nervous anxiety and ill-health.” Trembling, anxious, ill: today we have a more precise psychological vocabulary—though not necessarily any deeper personal insight—for this phenomenon which Dame Felicitas describes, the phenomenon of a human mind and body pushed beyond what it can endure by violence and fear. And in an age in which we are increasingly and painfully aware that many faithful Catholics suffer in this way within the Church (and in many cases because of the Church), it is consoling to remember that ours is not the first generation to discover that it is possible to live a faithful and fruitful life, consecrated to God in the heart of His Church, as a survivor of physical and psychological trauma.

But what other lessons might the story of these two communities have for Catholics of the twenty-first century, even those who are not themselves consecrated religious? One has to do with a familiar (perhaps overfamiliar) word in our contemporary Church vocabulary: listening. It seems at times that hardly a day goes by without a papal document or diocesan initiative exhorting us to listen. Many of us may find our patience fraying with each new ecclesial demand to listen to one or another group of aggrieved persons. What good can this ecclesial emphasis on listening do, we may wonder, in a world that requires the Church not to sit back and passively absorb information but to act? We already know that abuse is damaging, that power is misused, that a lot of Church communities need to sort themselves out; is there much use getting bogged down in subjective details when a summary report or synthesis would do the job with far greater clarity and speed?

One answer to these concerns comes from Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas. There he proposes listening to the victims of violence, in particular the violence of war, as one of the means by which we can take “daily and public responsibility” in “building the civilization of love” in our modern world; to “look at their faces, listen to their stories and acknowledge their wounds” is to “restore to victims the dignity of being recognized and heard” and enable the Church to be “a place of living memory for victims.”

Another answer, I suggest, comes from the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne and their Benedictine sisters. We may feel that we know these sisters pretty well already through going to see the opera or watching the film, both of which are likely a lot easier to follow than a history book. But when we come before the reliquary in Stanbrook Abbey containing those remaining scraps of the martyrs’ clothing, when we reach out to venerate, to pray, to touch, we make contact not with characters or narratives but with the history of real women: women who loved unto death and now, in turn, reach out to guide us with their prayer to their same heavenly goal. The spiritual discipline of choosing to encounter the martyrs’ story on its own terms may help us to apply that same discipline to the lives of those other victims of violence whom that “delicate touch of providence” has placed in our midst.

When the Church urges us to listen to those who have suffered, our minds turn inevitably to those on the Church on earth. But we can also listen to the survivors of the hosts of Heaven, “those old Saints who had been in prison,” as one of the last surviving Cambrai nuns described her sisters, to understand just what riches of wisdom and compassion await us when we have the humility to learn from those who have suffered and conquered in Christ. In whatever part of the Church and in whatever age, their stories deserve to be heard.