Ladislas Radigue e 3 compagni

Ladislas Radigue and three companions were priests of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, known as the Picpus Fathers, who were shot in Paris on 26 May 1871. The companions were Polycarpe Tuffier, Marcellin Rouchouze, and Frézal Tardieu. All four were French members of a religious institute founded in 1800 by Pierre Coudrin and Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie, which joined perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and devotion to the Sacred Hearts with missionary work. They are honored as blesseds of the Catholic Church, having been judged martyrs who died in hatred of the faith during the Paris Commune, the revolutionary regime that held the capital from March to late May 1871 and pursued a sharply anticlerical policy against the national government at Versailles.

Ladislas Radigue was born Pierre-Marie Radigue on 8 May 1823 at Saint-Georges-de-Rouelley in the department of Manche in Normandy. He entered the Picpus congregation, was ordained a priest, and was known in the institute for formation of religious and for responsibility in the Paris community. Polycarpe Tuffier was born in 1807 at Le Malzieu-Ville in Lozère and had spent long years in the priesthood of the congregation. Marcellin Rouchouze, born in 1810, and Frézal Tardieu, born in 1814 in the Lozère region, likewise served as Picpus priests. In the spring of 1871 the four were living in community in Paris. After the Commune seized the city it began taking ecclesiastics as hostages, treating the Church as an ally of Versailles and of the old social order.

The four priests were arrested in May 1871 and imprisoned, passing through Mazas and then the prison of La Roquette. On 26 May, during the recapture of Paris by regular troops in the fighting later called the Bloody Week, Communard militants removed a large body of hostages from La Roquette and took them to a courtyard at 85 rue Haxo in the Belleville district. There the prisoners were executed. The dead included the four Picpus Fathers, Father Henri Planchat of the Religious of Saint Vincent de Paul, and many other clerics and lay hostages. The massacre of the rue Haxo became one of the most notorious anticlerical killings of the Commune. Catholic accounts present the four priests as having met death while remaining faithful to their priesthood. Their bodies were left in a common grave at the site.

The Holy See judged that they had been killed in odium fidei. Pope Francis authorized the decree of martyrdom on 25 November 2021. They were beatified on 22 April 2023 at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris; Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, presided as papal legate. Henri Planchat was beatified in the same rite. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 26 May, the date of the rue Haxo massacre. They have not been canonized.