24 Aug 1572: St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

The Pope reacts to the slaughter of thousands of French Calvinists hunted and massacred on 24 August 1572 and the months that followed. We quote briefly from a fair and introductory article on wikipedia. In the same year, the Pope "excommunicated" Queen Elizabeth, having declared also the "dissolution of the oath of allegiance" by British subjects to their Queen. On 24 August 1572, Queen's Elizabeth's Spy-Master-in-Chief, Sir Francis Walsingham, a Calvinistic Anglican, barely escaped Paris himself. His report to the Queen was not favourable re: Popedom, religion and politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre

"The Politiques were horrified but many Catholics inside and outside France regarded the massacres, at least initially, as deliverance from an imminent Huguenot coup d'etat. The severed head of Coligny was apparently despatched to Pope Gregory XIII, though it got no further than Lyons, and the Pope sent the king a Golden Rose.[40] He ordered a Te Deum to be sung as a special thanksgiving (a practice continued for many years after) and had a medal struck with the motto Ugonottorum strages 1572 showing an angel bearing a cross and sword next to slaughtered Protestants.[41]

The massacre, with the murder of Gaspard de Coligny above left, as depicted in a fresco by Giorgio Vasari. The Pope also commissioned the artist Giorgio Vasari to paint three frescos in the Sala Regia depicting the wounding of Coligny, his death, and Charles IX before Parliament, matching ones on the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). `The massacre was interpreted as an act of divine retribution; Coligny was considered a threat to Christendom and thus the pope designated 11 September 1572 as a joint commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto and the massacre of the Huguenots.'[42] Although these formal acts of rejoicing in Rome were not repudiated publicly, privately misgivings in the papal curia grew once the nature of the killings gradually became better known. Gregory XIII himself refused to receive Charles de Maurevert, said to be the killer of Coligny, on the grounds he was a murderer. [43]"