Franz Stock

Catholic priest, wartime chaplain and peace activist

Franz Stock (21 September 1904, Neheim – 24 February 1948, Paris) was a German Roman Catholic priest. He is known for ministering to prisoners in France during World War II, and to German prisoners of war in the years following. The cause for his beatification has been accepted by the Holy See.

Stock was born the first of nine children of a worker family in the village of Neheim Hüsten (now part of Arnsberg), in the Province of Westphalia of the German Empire. From 1910 to 1913, he attended a Catholic elementary school. At the age of twelve Franz expressed a wish to become a priest. In 1926, he participated in an international peace meeting in Bierville near Paris, which was organized by Marc Sangnier under the motto "Peace via the young!" There Franz became friends with Joseph Folliet (1902–1973), who grew up to become a noted Catholic writer and who greatly influenced him. That same year, he entered the Catholic seminary in Paderborn. In the spring of 1928, Stock went to Paris, France, where he spent three semesters studying at the Institut Catholique. During this period, he became a member of the Compagnons du saint François (Companions of St. Francis), a fellowship committed to living a simple life and working for peace. He was the first German student of theology in France since the Middle Ages. As part of his pastoral mission, and with great peril to his life, he passed messages from the prisoners to their families and back, sometimes memorizing them. Exploiting every possible avenue to help the prisoners, he delivered German information on them to their families, so as to prepare them when interrogated. The information thus delivered prevented many arrests. This he did under a double threat to his life: besides the obvious peril of arrest, incarceration and/or execution if discovered, Stock suffered severe heart disease (a fact he kept from others) and thus had been ordered to rest. Nevertheless, he went on in his endeavor. On 10 June 1941, he was officially acknowledged as military chaplain with the rank of non commissioned officer. At the time of the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, Stock was in the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital, where more than 600 wounded German soldiers together with 200 British and American soldiers were lying, unfit for transport. When the Americans took command of the hospital, Stock became a prisoner of war of the Americans, and was sent to the POW camp of Cherbourg. This he accepted willingly, for it enabled him to help those who now needed most his services – the defeated German POWs. The Aumônerie Générale in Paris, planning to set up a seminary for captured German Catholic students of theology at the POW Camp Depot 51 at Orléans, contacted him. Shortly thereafter, Stock was asked to head this seminary as managing director, supported in particular by the Gaullist Edmond Michelet. His funeral was held four days later, at the Saint Jacques du Haut Pas church in Paris, with Nuncio Roncalli officiating. Only about 12 people accompanied his body to the cemetery of Thiais in Paris.

On 15/16 June 1963 his body was transferred to the newly built Church of Saint Jean Baptiste in Chartres. On 18 November 1981, in Fulda, during his visit to Germany, Pope John Paul II mentioned the name of Franz Stock along with the names of great saints of German history. The esplanade in front of the Mémorial de la France combattante has been named the Place Abbé Franz Stock in memory of the care he gave to the condemned prisoners while they were held in Fort Mont Valérien. On 1 March 1998, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his death was held in the Chartres Cathedral. The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, celebrated Pontifical High Mass in the presence of many French and German bishops, and of René Monory, President of the French Senate and of Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, who, beforehand, had laid down a wreath on Stock's grave.

There is an ongoing effort to have Franz Stock declared to be a saint. One miracle, usually a permanent and total medically unexplainable cure clearly and directly attributable to his intercession (as judged by a panel of neutral doctors and medical esperts, and by another panel of lay and clerical philosophers and theologians, who give their opinion to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, to be further considered, and forwarded to the Pope), is needed for him to be beatified, and a subsequent second such miracle for his canonization as a Saint. Before he can be beatified, the Church must declare that he lived a holy and virtuous life (a Servant of God), and that he lived it heroically and publicly in a manner worthy of respect and universal veneration (be Venerable).