[1] Born in Ardooie in West Flanders, Belgium to a Catholic family, he began training to be a priest at the Minor Seminary, Roeselare in 1886, before moving on to Bruges in 1892 to complete his studies.

Verschaeve told Himmler at this meeting that, while he rejected Nazi paganism, he thought Nazism could become complementary to the salvific message of the Church, as long as it remained political and activist.

[8] Until the end of the successful Allied offensive against the Nazi Wehrmacht in western Belgium, Verschaeve continued calling upon young Flemish, Catholic, adolescent boys to volunteer in the Waffen-SS foreign legions against Stalin and "Satanic Bolshevism".

He was condemned to death in absentia by a Belgian court, but survived in Austria until 1949, when he died of a heart attack at the vicarage of the Tyrolean town Solbad Hall,[10] and was buried there.

As an author he wrote a number of plays dealing with historical and Biblical characters with Judas (1919) and Maria-Magdalena (1930) now widely held to be the best works from a prolific but sketchy output.