IN HONOUR OF BROTHER AND BLESSED JEAN-MARIE GALLOT

Rightly, rivers of ink have been lavished to honour the memory of Brother Giordano Bruno who was burnt at the stake, at Campo de' Fiori in Rome, on 17th February 1600. We remember his courage in defending his thought and the freedom to express it: in defiance of every constraint and flattery. We have made him the ideal model of every Free Mason who proclaims himself as such and, often, we have used him as a battering ram to strike the Roman Church and its Holy Inquisition, accusing it of repressing the yearning to defend one's ideas. This was quite right. However, over the years - well over a century - we have forgotten another great, great witness to the values of Free Masonry. We have forgotten, guiltily, the Abbot and Brother Jean-Marie Gallot who was beheaded by Jacobin violence on 21 January 1794. Jean-Marie Gallot - born on 14th July 1732 - was a priest who was Deputy Parish Priest at Bazougers and Chaplain to the Benedictine Nuns of Laval. He was a simple priest who did not engage in political activity, but - according to the chronicles - lived withdrawn and in poverty: it is established that he lived off the support of the faithful. He was arrested on 18 December 1792 together with other priests and lay people. Freed in October 1793 by the Vendeans, he was soon afterwards put back in prison and on 21 January 1974 - together with 13 other priests - he was brought before the Jacobin Inquisition in the Tribunal. The President of the Tribunal - a man called Clèment - asked Gallot why he had not sworn allegiance to the republic. Gallot stated that he had not taken the oath and asked for an explanation of the meaning of that oath. The president replied that it meant: 'To be faithful to the republic and profess no religion, neither Catholic nor any other'. Gallot - in words reminiscent of those, famously, of Thomas More - replied: 'Citizen, in the public squares everywhere, I will always profess myself a Catholic, I will never blush for Jesus Christ'. Condemned to death, he and fourteen other priests - singing the Salve Regina and the Te Deum - walked towards the gallows. He was guillotined on the same day: 21 January 1794.

Jean-Marie Gallot was not just an 'obscure country priest', as he was hastily and contemptuously called by some Brothers. He was a Brother initiated into the respectable L'Union Lodge of Laval: as historians attest (cf. A. Bouton - M. Lepage, Histoire de la Franc-Maconnerie dans la Mayenne, Le Mans, 1951, pp. 80-83). But above all, he was a hero of Free Thought and a Martyr of both the Church and Free Masonry. Unless one thinks - but it would be aberrant, shameful and counter-initiative - that defending one's thought and freedom only applies to those who have been persecuted, unjustly, by the Church. And not for those who have been persecuted by equally intolerable Jacobin violence. Jean-Marie Gallot was no less than Giordano Bruno in strenuously defending his own ideas and values: if it is true, as Nietzsche maintained, that 'There is more in a man than there is in his philosophy'.

Priest and Brother Jean-Marie Gallot was remembered by the Roman Apostolic Church and proclaimed Blessed by H.H. Pius XII on 19 June 1955. Perhaps it is time that Universal Freemasonry also remembered him, honoured him and dedicated a few Respectable Lodges to him.

Claudio Bonvecchio