Last August the world lost one of its foremost ecumenists and spiritual leaders. Br. Roger Schutz, founder and prior of the ecumenical religious community of Taizé in Eastern France, was stabbed to death by a Romanian woman suffering from schizophrenia.
It happened during an evening prayer service in the presence of thirty-five hundred people, most of them young pilgrims who had come from around the world to spend a week in prayer and reflection. Br. Roger had celebrated his ninetieth birthday in May.
Born in Switzerland, the youngest of nine children, Schutz grew up in a devout Calvinist family. At the age of twenty-five, he and three other young Swiss Protestants traveled to Cluny in France to live as monks in their own religious tradition. They chose Cluny because it had been the site of one of the largest Benedictine monasteries. In its heyday Cluny was home to more than one thousand monks. Over time, the community diminished in size until it died out more than four hundred years ago. Today one can visit only its ruins.
While at Cluny, Schutz learned that a woman in Taizé, a village five miles away, wanted to sell her farm. He and his fellow monks decided to buy it, and moved there to live a common life of work and prayer. The farm was located near the demarcation line that divided occupied and unoccupied France during World War II. In the early years of the war the brothers helped Jews fleeing Nazi persecution escape to Switzerland. The Nazis eventually found out, and the monks were expelled from France.
After the war the brothers, now seven in number, returned to Taizé and to their charitable work. (In those years they assisted children orphaned by the war.) Over time the community attracted more and more men. In 1963, a group of Germans offered to build a large church in Taizé, in atonement for the atrocities committed in that region by the Nazis. Though the brothers saw no practical reason for a larger building, they accepted the offer. In honor of their commitment to Christian unity, they called the new sanctuary the Church of the Reconciliation. Ironically, the new church would eventually become too small to receive Taizé’s growing number of pilgrims.
In 1966 so many people poured into Taizé for the Easter service that the community decided to break down the rear walls of the church. About ten years ago, as people from former Communist countries like Poland began flocking to Taizé, the church was enlarged to three times its original size. Under Schutz’s leadership the community attracted millions of young pilgrims from all over the world.
The first Roman Catholic joined Taizé in 1966. Br. Guilain, a Belgian physician, was sponsored by Cardinal Gabriel Marty, the archbishop of Paris. Since then, more and more Roman Catholics have joined. Today, fifty-five of the approximately one hundred monks are Catholic.
The new prior is Br. Alois Leser, a fifty-one-year-old German Catholic. The community will continue to pray for Christian unity and live according to the “Rule of Taizé,” which Schutz composed during a long retreat in the early 1950s. The rule emphasizes the importance of living simply: “Throughout your day let work and rest be quickened by the word of God. Maintain interior silence in all things in order to dwell in Christ. Be filled by the spirit of the Beatitudes, joy, simplicity, mercy.”
Having visited Taizé many times since 1971, I had the privilege of knowing Br. Roger and the community rather well. The prayers he composed for each service were profound meditations on the Holy Spirit. In one of them he wrote, “Christ transfigures the ‘no’ that is in me day after day into [a] ‘yes.’” The truth of these words was apparent in the days following Br. Roger’s death: the other monks declined to condemn his killer, instead offering forgiveness. Their hearts were transformed by Christ. It is no wonder that the community of Taizé has been called un abîme de charité-an abyss of charity.
Even though Br. Roger Schutz is gone, his spirit lives in the community he founded. Death does not have the last word. Schutz will experience the joy of the risen Lord in the mystery of death and new life so appropriately sung in the hymns of Taizé: “Darkness is not darkness in your presence, O Lord / The night like the day is full of light.”
