Religion: Barbed-Wire Seminary

Below the hill of Chartres, with its glorious Gothic tribute to the power of God, sprawls a drab and dirty token of modern man—the hutments and barbed wire of Prisoner of War Camp 501. Outwardly antithetical, camp and cathedral are both repositories of the same faith. Of the 5,000 German soldiers behind the wire, 450 are studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood under a prisoner-faculty of seven.

The abbé is tall, blond Father Franz Stock, prewar head of the German Catholic Church in Paris. During the Nazi occupation he served as priest in prisons and hospitals, and administered last rites to thousands of Frenchmen executed by the Nazis. He visited them in their cells, rode with them to their execution, buried them, sent their belongings to their families.

To take charge of the prison seminary, 42-year-old Father Stock had to become a voluntary prisoner of war. When the camp is closed and the prisoners repatriated, he wants to return to his church in Paris. Says he: “It makes no difference where I serve, so long as I am of the greatest use. In the Kingdom of God there are no geographical divisions.”

To study under Father Stock a prisoner must pass a simple screening: prove that he was a seminarian before he was a soldier. A single interview suffices. Seminarians are excused from regular P.W. labor in the fields, live in separate quarters. But their regimen is strict. Rising at a 6 a.m. bell, they pray and meditate until mass at 6:45, held in a plain, wooden structure decorated with murals by their abbé.

The seminary at Chartres is not unique. At Rivet, near Algiers, a seminary was set up in 1943 by General Robert Boisseau, who was in charge of German war prisoners during the Allied African invasion. When Boisseau moved to France, he organized the one at Chartres, procured Father Stock to head it.

Protestants have followed the Catholic example. A year ago in a prison barracks at Montpellier they opened a P.W. seminary with 30 German prisoner-pupils, now have 140.