Suggest an Edit — François Joseph Pey

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Biography

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François-Joseph Pey was a French diocesan priest and martyr of the French Revolution. He was born on 10 May 1759 in Mende, in the historic province of Gévaudan in southern France (today in the department of Lozère). He received ecclesiastical formation and was ordained to the priesthood, later serving as vicar of the parish of Saint-Landry on the Île de la Cité in Paris. Contemporary notices of his life before the Revolution are relatively sparse, as is typical for many secular clergy of the period who were not members of a religious order and who left few personal writings; what is firmly attested is his pastoral assignment in the capital and his subsequent refusal to compromise with the revolutionary religious legislation.

In 1790 the National Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which reorganized the French Church under civil authority and required clergy to swear an oath of loyalty. Pey was among the non-juring, or refractory, priests who declined the oath out of fidelity to the Holy See. As penalties against refractory clergy grew harsher, he was arrested and confined with other priests. On 2 September 1792, during the September Massacres, armed crowds attacked several Paris prisons holding clergy and political detainees. Pey was among those held at the former Carmelite convent (the Prison des Carmes), where a large number of priests were killed that day. He died there as a martyr rather than abandon his priestly state or his communion with Rome.

The victims of the Carmes and of the other September prison massacres were later grouped in the cause of the Martyrs of September. On 17 October 1926 Pope Pius XI beatified 191 of them, including François-Joseph Pey. They have not been canonized. Their liturgical commemoration is kept on 2 September, the principal date of the massacres. Individual biographical detail beyond birth, ministry, refusal of the oath, imprisonment, and death remains limited in the surviving record; the beatification rested on the public character of their deaths for the faith and on contemporary testimony to the events of early September 1792 in Paris.

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