The Song of the Scaffold. (Book Note).

Gertrud von le Fort, The Song of the Scaffold, Sophia Institute Press, P0 Box 5284, Manchester, NH, 03108, 2001,124 pp, $21.35 Cdn. Available in Canada from St. Joseph Workshop, [phone]

At the bloodthirsty height of the French Revolution, on July 17, 1794, sixteen Carmelite Sisters were guillotined for being members of a religious community. Four years previously they had been put out of their convent; they dispersed into four groups and wore secular attire. They kept their former way of life however, hoping that the violence of the revolution might wane. Instead of waning, however, it increased. The Sisters were put in jail because they were still living as a religious community. A month later, on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, sixteen of them were tried and were sentenced to immediate execution. Before mounting the scaffold each of the first fifteen obtained her Superior's blessing. As they were being guillotined one by one, the Sisters sang the Miserere, the Salve Regina, and the The Deum. They were beatified in 1906.

This book is a novel based on their last few years by one of Germany's greatest Catholic women writers. It is a reprint of the first English edition published in 1933.