Natalis Pinot

Noël Pinot, known in Latin as Natalis Pinot, was born in 1747 in Angers, in the historic province of Anjou in western France. He came from a large family of modest artisan means; his father worked as a weaver, and traditional accounts describe him as one of many children. He was educated in his native city, entered the seminary of Angers, and was ordained a priest for that diocese in the early 1770s. In the years after ordination he served as a curate in several parishes of the diocese of Angers. In 1788 he was appointed parish priest of Le Louroux-Béconnais, a rural parish west of Angers, where he was serving when the French Revolution began to recast the legal status of the Catholic Church in France.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 required priests to swear an oath of loyalty to a state-reorganized church. Pinot refused the oath and thereby joined the refractory, or non-juring, clergy. In 1791 he was removed from his parish and replaced by a constitutional priest. He did not emigrate. Remaining in Anjou, he continued a clandestine ministry among the faithful, celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments in barns, farmhouses, and other hidden places as repression of non-juring priests intensified in western France, a region soon marked by the Vendée war and related insurgency.

In February 1794, during the Terror and the military crackdown in Maine-et-Loire, Pinot was discovered and arrested as he was preparing to celebrate Mass, still wearing his liturgical vestments. He was taken to Angers, tried by a revolutionary commission, and condemned to death. On 21 February 1794 he was executed by guillotine in Angers. According to the traditional account of his martyrdom, he went to the scaffold in his chasuble and spoke the opening words of the Mass, "Introibo ad altare Dei" ("I will go unto the altar of God").

Local memory of Pinot as a priest-martyr of the Revolution persisted in Anjou. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 31 October 1926. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 21 February. He has not been canonized and is venerated as Blessed. He was a secular diocesan priest, not a member of a religious order, and is remembered for remaining with his people in secret pastoral work rather than taking the constitutional oath.