Franz Stock

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.

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 then met with more than 2,000 prisoners, including the French Navy officer Henri Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves, the Communist Gabriel Péri and the Gaullist Edmond Michelet.

[3] 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.

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.

On 17 August 1945, the "barbed-wire seminary", the séminaire des barbelés, was transferred from Orléans to Camp 501 at Le Coudray, near Chartres.

On 19 August 1945, Raoul-Octove-Marie-Jean Harscouët, Bishop of Chartres, accompanied by his secretary Abbé Pierre André, visited the POW seminary.

On 18 September 1945, Nuncio Roncalli (future Pope John XXIII), came for a longer visit at the camp and returned on 16 July 1946, declaring: The seminary of Chartres is praiseworthy for both countries, France as well as Germany.

It is very suitable for becoming a sign of understanding and reconciliation.From 1945 till 1947, Stock was managing director of the prisoner of war séminaire des barbelés of Chartres.

[6] 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.

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.

[10]There are, I believe, only a few Christian life stories which have given to the Catholicism of the church and peace of Christ such a direct and lasting effect and rendered such a surviving testimony for the future, like the one of Franz Stock.