Part 1 - A Curious Tale of Two Priests in Beyssenac, Corrèze

To the west of Corrèze, on the Dordogne border, is the pretty little village of Beyssenac. It is surrounded by a large commune having a total population of something under 400 souls. The Mayor is young, intelligent and very popular and under his leadership the village has been able to develop as a popular and peaceful place to live. But as my story unfolds you will find that it was not always that way. However the story comes from 1907-8 which none of us can have experienced. What was Beyssenac like then? Certainly there were no gritted roads, no cars, nor streetlights. Those things we take for granted now, like electricity, internet, TV and radio, were all absent. Horses would have been the only means of transport and communication, on uncertain tracks and lanes between the scattered farms and other villages. By today's norms it would have looked a rather dilapidated place; very different from its current role as the best floral village with under 1000 inhabitant, in Corrèze. But the population within the commune would have been at least twice and maybe thrice that of now with most of the people living and working in the many farms throughout the commune. There were shops and schools to serve the population and even three auberges. The people would be God-fearing, attending church every Sunday in their best clothe, with the church at the centre of village activities. Unlike now, foreigners would be, to a very large extent, unknown.

 

In 1905 France introduced the separation of Church and State. This transferred the church assets within the communes to the commune itself who became the owner of the churches, the presbyteries, and the cemeteries: a situation which remains to this day. And this was the root cause of the story to follow.

 

(The story comes from a journal, Limouzi, Oct 2005, and an article in the Municipal Bulletin of Beyssenac, March 2007)

 

In February 1907 the Beyssenac Council with their new powers ordered the Mayor to evict the local priest from his presbytery in order to provide a home for the local school mistress. He gave him two days notice as of 1^st March!! Fed-up with this development, for after all he had been the local Abbé since 1898, he quit and left the parish on 7^th March. Until a new appointee could be found the priest of the nearby commune, Ségur, supported Beyssenac.

 

To fill the post of the parish priest it seems that the deputy mayor looked into the idea of forming a relationship with a breakaway group of the Catholic Church. He thought of assigning the church and presbytery to them, and subsequently influenced the mayor to support the idea. Meanwhile a group of local people also wrote to the established archbishop saying how miserable it was without a priest, with no mass, weddings or burial services.

 

The mayor, influenced by his deputy, invited this breakaway group to send them a priest. One did arrive on 26 May and the church had to be broken into to install him, as the priest of Ségur had the key. However he only stayed for 10 days!

 

Several more months passed without a priest until the arrival on 15 August of one Emilien Salomon Goudstikker. As we now know, he was only 21, tall, almost emaciated, strangely hirsute, and English!! It seemed that no one questioned his right to take over the parish, asking for his papers of authority, or even his identity card. Trust in an apparent man of the cloth was paramount, and he had already had some activity in Beyssac. Beyssenac at that time had probably never ever seen a foreigner, and would not know one from another. His name came from his father who was Dutch; his mother was French, but he had been born in London in 1887, hence the award of British nationality. However he had been brought up in France by his grandmother, but had never been ordained, just shown how to conduct a Mass by one of the cult members, but this was not known at the time.  Nevertheless, there must have been something attractive about him as almost all the parish seemed to content to follow him, and calm reigned for a while.

 

In October the local schoolteacher was fully installed in the presbytery, and at about this time the senior representative of the established church responsible for the parish of Beyssenac suggested to an Abbé Bourzeix that he might like to move to Beyssenac. The proposal was that he would conduct Mass in a barn almost adjacent to the church until the intruder was moved on. He was welcomed by the Peyramaure family and lodged with them. The sacred items needed for Mass were supplied by a now retired, but earlier, priest of Beyssenac.

 

The stage was now set for a very difficult period, with the breakaway cult in the actual church with the priest, Goudstikker, living within the sacristy, and the established church in the barn alongside. Before Christmas 1907 the mayor spoke to his commune asking for calm and no quarrels, and that the two priests should ask their congregations to be peaceful.

 

Read part 2 tomorrow.

 

 

 

Copyright © Neil Spoonley 2009

 
Posted by: neil spoonley on 11 August 2009