Vezelay

Extract

Vezelay is a place extraordinarily little known considering its beauty and historic interest. Situated some 150 miles south-west of Paris, in Burgundy, almost at the very centre of France, it was in the 12th century one of the great shrines of Christendom. To Vézelay pilgrims went from the whole of Europe to pay honour to St Mary Magdalen whose body the Benedictines claimed to have taken there from St Maximin. There in 1146 when the nave of the present basilica stood in all its newness, St Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade before King Louis VII and a multitude assembled from every Christian country. From the pulpit of the basilica 20 years later St Thomas Becket, in exile, solemnly excommunicated Henry II. To Vézelay went Henry’s son, Bichard Coeur de Lion, to take the Cross with Philip Augustus in the 3rd Crusade. St Francis’s first foundation in France was made there, the Cordelerie on the slope of the hill; Brother Pacifieus founded it, and it was to be honoured with a visit from St Louis as he went to the Holy Land. Today only the Basilica remains, and a great wooden cross to commemorate St Bernard’s preaching, and the ruined chapel of the Cordelerie. Vézelay stands a symbol of divided Christendom. The town was the birthplace of Theodore Béza, In 1568 the Protestants captured it, devastated the abbey which had for 30 years been secularised, its monks having long since become odious to the townsfolk, burned the relics, and subjected the Franciscans to the horrible sport of burying two of them up to their necks and playing bowls against them with the heads of their companions.