Charles-Antoine-Nicolas Ancel

Charles-Antoine-Nicolas Ancel was born on 11 October 1760 in Rouen, in Normandy, France. He entered the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, commonly called the Eudists, a society of apostolic life founded in the seventeenth century by Saint John Eudes for the formation of the clergy and for missionary preaching. Ordained a priest, he belonged to a congregation that was still relatively young in the French Church and that was suppressed, like other religious institutes, when the Revolution dismantled the old ecclesiastical order.

After 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy required priests to swear an oath that the Holy See judged incompatible with communion with Rome. Ancel, like other Eudists who remained faithful to the papacy, refused the oath and was classed among the refractory clergy. Non-juring priests were liable to imprisonment, deportation, or death. In 1794 he was arrested and sent with hundreds of other priests to the Atlantic port of Rochefort, where the revolutionary authorities intended to ship them to French Guiana.

A British naval blockade prevented the prison ships from sailing. The priests were held in extreme overcrowding, filth, and want aboard the hulks Deux-Associés and Washington in the Charente estuary. Epidemic disease and starvation killed the majority of the more than eight hundred clergy confined there. The dying were sometimes put ashore on nearby Île Madame. Ancel died of the effects of this imprisonment on 29 July 1794, at the age of thirty-three. He was buried on the island with many of his companions.

On 1 October 1995 Pope John Paul II beatified sixty-four of those who had died on the Rochefort pontons, including Ancel, judging their deaths to have been martyrdom in hatred of the faith. They are known as the Blessed Martyrs of the Hulks of Rochefort. A memorial on Île Madame commemorates the priests buried there. Ancel is remembered as a young Eudist who would not separate himself from the Church and who perished in the prison ships rather than take the schismatic oath.