Description of the attraction
La Chapelle du Martyre, the Chapel of the Martyrs, is not immediately noticeable on the street of Yvon-le-Tac: it is inscribed in a row of residential buildings, next to it is a noisy college.
The building is located on the site where about 250 pagans beheaded the first bishop of Lutetia, Saint Dionysius of Paris and two of his associates. Montmartre got its name in memory of this event (Montmartre - "mountain of martyrs"). A chapel with an underground crypt was erected here in the 5th century by Saint Genevieve. In the 9th century, during the siege of Paris, the building was destroyed by the Vikings, it was rebuilt. Here Jeanne d'Arc prayed before the battle for Paris.
In the 19th century, the chapel was reconstructed and its appearance completely changed. Now on the wall of a stylized Gothic chapel is a stone slab with a carved text: here St. Dionysius was beheaded. A little further - a conventional image of the pious widow Catulla, who buried the martyr. You can get here once a week, on Friday.
But the crypt under the chapel is still the same, the same. It is here, in a quiet corner of Montmartre, that one of the greatest events in Christendom took place.
On August 15, 1534, a poor Spanish nobleman, Doctor of Divinity Ignatius Loyola, with six of his comrades went down to the crypt of the Chapel of the Martyrs. Here, Peter Lefebvre, who had just been ordained a priest, celebrated the Holy Mass, and seven took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to the Lord. They did not yet know that, by taking vows, they were creating the Society of Jesus - a male monastic order of the Catholic Church. An order, the purpose and purpose of which will be to serve the faith and spread justice.
The Order was legally constituted in 1540. But six years earlier, while partaking of the Holy Gifts in Montmartre, its founders were already aware of their mission as "companions of Jesus." In all centuries, the Order has united missionaries, teachers, scientists, doctors, carpenters, poets, statesmen. Unafraid of labor and hardship, they went where the Church needed them. Each had a mission entrusted to him to take care of the people of God. First of all, about the orphans, the sick, the fallen. They carried a mission of mercy with the energy of the apostles and the fearlessness of the founder of the Order.
The world called them Jesuits, often giving the word an ironic connotation. At the end of the 20th century, the Order humbly accepted this self-name: Jesuits and Jesuits. Twenty thousand men around the world are serving the Lord today as once in the crypt of the Chapel of the Martyrs an amazing man vowed to serve Him - the poor Spanish nobleman Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
