Father Louis Doumain (1920-1944)

Dec. 1, 2025

By Columbia staff

Dec. 1, 2025

Blessed Louis Doumain. (Photo courtesy of the Diocese of Viviers)

The Gestapo offered Father Louis Doumain freedom on one condition — that he stop saying Mass. “Anything you want, but not that,” he replied. “That’s why I became a priest.” The 24-year-old abbé had been conscripted as a laborer and sent to a German town near Leipzig. Shortly after celebrating a clandestine Mass in the woods, he was placed under arrest.

Born in Morinville, Alberta, to French immigrants, Doumain returned to France with his parents as a young boy. He later entered the major seminary at Viviers, in southwest France, and was ordained a priest in 1942, at age 22.

The next year, Doumain was conscripted into the Service du Travail Obligatoire — a Vichy work program that supplied French laborers to Nazi Germany — and sent to an aluminum factory in Bitterfeld. There he was identified as a priest and assigned to the smelting furnace, one of the most arduous jobs.

At first, Father Doumain carried out a public ministry among the workers, celebrating Mass in the parish church and hearing confessions. But on Dec. 3, 1943, the Kaltenbrunner Ordinance made pastoral care for French laborers a punishable offense.

On Sept. 19, 1944, after celebrating Mass in the woods outside Bitterfeld for 40 “Jocists” — members of the Young Christian Workers — Father Doumain was arrested by the Gestapo.

Upon refusing to abnegate his priestly duties, Father Doumain was sent to a labor camp at Spergau and later Zöschen, where he fell ill, underwent throat surgery, and lost the ability to speak. He died at Zöschen on Dec. 20, 1944. He is one of 50 French martyrs of Nazi persecution who will be beatified at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on Dec. 13.

Father Louis Doumain (1920-1944)

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