Aumoniers

At the turn of the last century, France had as anticlerical a Government as ever hated & feared the Pope. French lawmakers bundled up their prejudices in a Laic Law which, among other things, required State authorization for religious orders. When France went to war in 1914, thousands of members of secret, mufti-wearing orders emerged from their bolt-holes to serve la patrie. The number of aumoniers (chaplains) in the French forces was limited--400 in the army, 50 in the navy, none in the air force. Most priests were assigned to noncombatant duties. A few had anticlerical officers who forced them to fight. A few more fathers showed a taste for fighting and fought bravely. So grateful was the Government that the Laic Law was thereafter suspended, and an attempt by Edouard Herriot to revive it failed in 1924.

Beford World War II broke, the number of army aumyrniers was increased to 600. The navy quota remained the same; the air force got 30. Catholic aumonier general (chaplain general), commanding 500-odd Catholic aumyrniers, is Monsignor Maurice Sudour, Archdeacon of St. Denis, who gets a general's pay, wears a general's star. Ordinary chaplains have no rank, but a captain's pay, wear religious garb behind the lines, khaki at the front. By special dispensation from Rome, all Catholic aumyrniers and other front-line priests may hear confession, give extreme unction, sing mass at portable altars, at any time under any conditions.

A monument in the Vosges marks the spot where, in 1914, Grand Rabbi Abraham Bloch was killed while bringing a cross to a dying French officer. Last week Grand Rabbi Maurice Liber, peacetime head of Paris' rabbinical school, now aumonier general for the army's Jews, combed France for Jewish chaplains. Entitled to 48, he could find only 26. The total enrollment of the rabbinical school--twelve youths--was mobilized in the army, but proved insufficiently trained to serve as aumyrniers.

Protestant aumonier general is France's most famed Protestant--tall, white-haired, meticulous Rev. Marc Boegner, 58, under whose leadership 1,000,000 French Protestants, representing all the big churches save the Lutheran (in Alsace) and the Baptist, were reunited last year after a century of schism. Half of General Boegner's 1,000 pastors have been mobilized, and 75 installed as chaplains. For French Protestantism, mobilization posed a problem: how to keep its churches running. M. Boegner solved it by recalling aged ministers from retirement, giving pulpit work to laymen and even to "some young ladies who have made profound studies in theology."

Of France's 50,000 Catholic "regular" priests (in religious orders), 8,000 were mobilized last week. Leading in numbers were Jesuits, Christian Brothers and the peaceable Franciscans. Typical fighting fathers: Franciscan Aviation Captain Boigerolles; Pere Godefroy of the White Fathers, second lieutenant in the Senegalese sharpshooters; Jesuit Father Carre, in the tank corps.

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