(OSV News) -- Five Catholic priests have been beatified in France, 152 years after they were seized as hostages and shot in the street by rebels of the Paris Commune.
'The story of these martyrs offers a warning for today, but also a message of hope from a Christian perspective,' said Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
'The circumstances to which they fell victim -- with several dozen other people also massacred by revolutionaries in their