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Brother Roger of Taize ... a life
ROGER SCHUTZ, Prior of Taizé, created the first
ecumenical community in Europe, and now, 65 years later,
it numbers more than 100 men from Protestant, Catholic
and Orthodox churches.
Though Taizé began as a community for Protestant men,
concentrating on prayer, self-supporting work and caring
activities, this tiny Burgundian village has become a
centre of world pilgrimage where tens of thousands of
young people have sensed that reconciliation between
nations and churches is being lived out in practice.
The charisma of this frail and sensitive Swiss pastor
without oratorical gifts has attracted more young people
than any other religious leader in Europe, Catholic or
Protestant. He linked prayer and the fight against
injustice using the phrase “struggle and contemplation”.
Worship three times a day is part of a life which
includes a farm co-operative, a printing press and
studios for painting and pottery.
Roger Louis Schutz was born in 1915 in the Swiss Jura,
the youngest child of a Swiss Lutheran pastor and a
French mother. He suffered TB in adolescence, and during
one long convalescence he reflected on the savagery of
the First World War and the disputes between the
churches and turned against faith. However, he went to
study theology at Strasbourg and Lausanne. At the
latter, where his thesis was on early European
monasticism, he formed a small student community and he
was ordained as a pastor.
In 1940 he went alone to the almost deserted village of
Taizé near Cluny in Burgundy on the boundary between
occupied and unoccupied France. Abandoned children, Jews
and others fleeing the Gestapo heard about Taizé where
Roger could help them to escape. In 1942 he was himself
denounced and only the fortunate chance that he was away
saved him from the concentration camps.
After the liberation of France Brother Roger returned to
Taizé with three friends, and they founded a tiny,
unendowed community. Five years later, they took the
three traditional vows in a new form: celibacy,
community of goods, and acceptance of an authority. Like
the 12th-century founders of Fountains Abbey, they
endured hardship and unpopularity, especially when they
befriended German PoWs, one of whom, a young priest, was
whipped to death by French women who had lost many of
their men in the Resistance.
From the beginning they looked far beyond rural Burgundy
to the gigantic changes in postwar society. Groups of
brothers left Taizé for the first of many attempts to
live in the new society at Montceaux-les-Mines. Later
other groups moved to Sheffield, New York, South America
and Mexico, always choosing a poor area in which to live
and earn their living. In Bari they swept the streets
and in Sheffield worked in the Attercliffe steel works.
Roger became a close friend of Leslie Hunter, the
pioneering Bishop of Sheffield, who often visited Taizé
and commended its “community of dedicated young men” as
living a life from which “we have much to learn”.
Archbishops Ramsey and Carey also visited Taizé.
Roger always hoped for closer relations with Rome and
was regarded with suspicion by some in the World Council
of Churches and the French Reformed Church, who saw
Taizé as a Vatican Trojan horse.
All the popes felt that Roger had an extraordinary
charisma. Pius XII allowed him to plead that the dogma
of the Assumption should not be promulgated simply on
the basis of papal infallibility. John XXIII saw Taizé
as “that little springtime” and invited the community to
Rome during the sessions of Vatican II. With his usual
tact, Roger did not comment on the turmoil after Paul
VI’s Humanae vitae (1968) but he felt that winter
had settled on European Christianity. His response was
to welcome more and more young people to Taizé — in 1974
40,000 came for a Council of Youth. Some of the brothers
protested that the crowds of visitors to Taizé made the
life of contemplation impossible. In the 1960s German
Christians had presented a huge new church in which the
brothers inserted windows of fine stained glass where
the worship and silence were compelling. In the 1970s
even this church became too small, and its back wall was
taken down so that tents could be erected for up to
3,000 worshippers.
The Taizé worship was both original and traditional.
Fragments of many languages were used. Intercessions
focused on injustice in the world, and the Taizé style
of music, which had already spread to many European
countries, added a new dimension. Some of the brothers
still longed for quiet, but after much discussion the
community agreed that with the traditional churches in
such disarray, turning away the young people coming from
Africa, Spain, Latin America and even the Eastern bloc
countries would drive them into agnosticism.
Nevertheless, the sense at Taizé that there was a large
brotherhood committed to very private lives of prayer
and contemplation deepened the atmosphere which the
visitors came to find.
Roger’s visits to cities were astonishing. He drew
thousands of young people to London in 1981 and 1987. By
miracles of efficiency and goodwill, St Paul’s,
Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the cathedrals
in Southwark and Methodist Central Hall were linked so
that prayers, hymns and words could be relayed from each
to the others. St Paul’s had its largest congregation
since VE-Day — more than 9,000 worshippers with
simultaneous translation in several languages. The sense
of reconciliation between visitors from the East and the
West was personal and moving.
When the 1995 visit to Paris attracted 25,000 people,
the strain on hospitality in the parishes was too great,
and Jewish communities took in Catholics from Poland,
the army provided barracks and the Métro gave free
transport.
Even some admirers felt there were shadows at Taizé. The
place of women remained ambivalent, for instance.
Married brothers were not admitted, and a few of the
brothers who left to get married seemed never to be
referred to again. Perhaps, too, the original commitment
to political protest waned. Some felt that Roger so
disliked the nitty-gritty of argument and theological
study that he failed to notice the ingrained
authoritarianism of the papal system, and even some
Catholic theologians felt that he colluded with the
recent reactionary tendencies of the Vatican.
His language seemed occasionally to become confused and
unduly mystical over difficult questions. However, his
writings show that he was aware of, and determined to
avoid, the dangers of becoming a cult figure. The
cohesion of his community with so many types of
personality is a testimony to his determination and the
attractiveness of his character. Roger wrote many books
on prayer, and in 1988 he was awarded the Unesco Prize
for Peace Education.
Roger did something to fill the gap in European
Christian leadership left by the premature death of
William Temple, the brevity of the pontificate of John
XXIII, the hanging of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the loss
of many young Christian leaders in wartime.
Taizé’s visitors always included some who were making a
last attempt to find something positive in the churches.
Roger would listen to them far into the night, in the
church, or one of his brothers would take the visitor
out on to the hillside to watch the sun set and the
lights come on across the valley.
Brother Roger was stabbed to death by a Romanian woman
who was among some 2,500 visitors attending evening
prayers at the community which he established to to live
out the spirit of the Beatitudes.
Brother Roger, Prior of Taizé, was born on May 12, 1915.
He died on August 16, 2005, aged 90.
© Times Newspapers
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All information has been reproduced here for educational
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