Clerics in the trenches: French priests in WWI

Many people would be surprised to learn that in World War I, priests were conscripted to serve in the French Army. All were not chaplains. Some were stretcher-bearers and some were actual arms-bearing combatants. Anita Rasi May’s “Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I” tells the story of these brave and unusual patriots.
 
In 1899 and1905, laws were passed in France that “provided for the drafting of seminarians and priests into military service,” May explains. The 1899 law brought them in for one year as non-combatants; the 1905 law eliminated the exemption from regular military duty and extended their term of service to two years.
 
In her work, May writes about 33 “priests whose memoirs and biographies” she examined. Her findings are presented in a somewhat scholarly fashion; “Patriot Priests” is not light reading. This is not surprising since May served as the executive director of the Oklahoma Humanities Council for more than 27 years, and she is a published author and educator. The book includes 15 pages of notes to the text (130 pages), a seven-page bibliography and an index. The book is published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
 
Ch. 1, “The Anticlerical Third Republic,” explains more about the laws of 1899 and 1905 and how and why these were enacted. The still earlier, so-called Ferry laws had tried to effect the separation of church and state, even the de-Christianization of France. Members of religious orders could not live in community or wear habits. The state took over the education of children. The Jesuit order was dissolved, and while other orders could “apply for authorization,” May writes that “the others refused to apply” and left the country.
 
When they were drafted in World War I, priests and seminarians responded surprisingly well, and there was support from the Church hierarchy. “Bishops and priests, women and men in religious orders, forgot their well-founded grievances and rallied to the national defense,” May writes. Bishops offered Church buildings for use as hospitals, and there was a surge of Catholic devotion.
 
“Priests were astonished by the resurgence of religious fervor they witnessed,” she continues. Both soldiers and civilians again attended Mass and received the sacraments. Not only were priests drafted; many more volunteered to serve without pay as chaplains.
 
All this caused the priest to re-examine their roles, their place in all of this. Jean Julien Weber, one of May’s case studies, wrote that his military service brought him in contact “with the moral poverty of so many of my comrades” that he was cured of his “exaggerated intellectualism.” He writes that all of this made him “capable of being a new kind of apostle.”
 
Franciscan monk Edouard de Massat wrote to his sister that “The war … is a missionary whose voice is more elegant than our own.”
 
The priests wanted to prove “that they were just as patriotic as every other Frenchman,” May narrates. One seminarian wrote, “My country has need of me, and I will go,” another that he “felt proud to wear the uniform.”
 
Some chaplains even led troops when their commanding officer was killed. May writes that some of them “were shocked by their own response to killing and being engaged in the war.”
 
The priests “looked after the soldiers’ temporal needs” and “helped them communicate with their families.” They helped families locate missing loved ones; they buried the dead. As they performed these many duties with care and dedication, “feelings of comradeship grew” between the priests and the soldiers.
 
Many of the priests paid a great price in their service. May notes that 23,418 parish priests served during the war; 3,101 were killed and 7,769 received citations and decorations.
 
The war ended, and the men and priests returned home. The French prime minister planned to close the French embassy at the Vatican (it had been re-opened during the war) and exile religious orders.
 
The French would have none of it. There were mass demonstrations, some of them attended by priest-veterans in uniform. The prime minister relented.
 
While serving, the priests had to come to terms with war, patriotism and their own humanity, and it was, May concludes, “this transformation that helped mitigate the antagonism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Third Republic.”
 
J.E. Helm is a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.