Roger Schutz  (Taize, Les Presses de Taize, 1968, 239pp.)

The death in August 2005 of Roger Schutz - Brother Roger as he was known - is a time to look at his life and in particular at this book written in 1968 - a year of changes and tumult, marked by student protests, particularly strong in the USA and France, the on-going war in Vietnam and the efforts to find ways to negotiate its end, the hope of the Prague Spring and its end in August with the entry of Soviet troops, violent race relations in the USA, and strong debates within the Roman Catholic Church concerning reforms proposed - and some put into place- by the Vatican II Council.

Roger Schutz was a French-speaking Swiss Protestant minister in the tradition of Jean Calvin whose thought and reforms have deeply marked the Swiss Protestant Church.  Schutz's father was also a Protestant minister and the extended family was very active in church-related activities.  In 1940 Schutz had the revolutionary and not very Protestant idea of creating a monastic order devoted to reconciliation and Christian unity.  There were no monastic orders in the Calvinist Protestant tradition, unlike the Anglican and Lutheran traditions which continued having orders within the church.  However, there is nothing in Calvinist theology standing in the way of a monastic group, only a strong tradition and an ingrained revolt against the abuses of power and wealth that had existed in monasteries in the Catholic Church.

Schutz had in his early twenties a nearly-fatal case of tuberculosis.  A little as in Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", he was able to use the time of recovery to seek the meaning of life and his vocation .  Roger Schutz and a very small group of friends undertook their efforts at a time of deep distress.  In 1940 when Schutz was only 25, France had been overrun and occupied by Nazi troops.  The country was deeply divided on what policy to follow.  Most of the Catholic Church leaders followed the government of Philip Petain which had its headquarters in "unoccupied France" at Vichy while the Germans controlled Paris.  The Catholic Church leadership was conservative and not looking for any new ideas.  The French Protestant church, a small minority of the total population, had a tradition of being politically to the Left and so were less drawn to Petain's rightist "National Revolution", but in 1940 the resistence in which Protestants played an important role, was not yet organized.  Sensible Swiss stayed in Switzerland which was a neutral country and had a standard of life much higher than countries occupied by the Nazi forces.  Yet it was to France that Schutz and his friends came, not even to an area where there was a relatively large Protestant community but to a small village in Burgundy which had had strong monastic orders until the French Revolution.  However, in the 1930s and 1940s it was a region where only a minority attended Catholic Church services and there were few, if any, Protestants.

On a hill top in the small village of Taize -which gave its name to the group- they bought an abandoned house with several farm buildings.  It was an austere life.  Drinking water had to be carried from a well at some distance.  They had a few cows for milk and cheese. They began to develop a ritual of morning, noon, and evening common prayer services, of farm work to be self-sufficient, and periods of study and discussion.  The troubles of the world came to their doorstep, often in the form of Jewish refugees who had to be hidden under false identities.

At the end of the war in 1945, there were 15 members of the community who had taken life-time vows.  They were, however, considered as "strange".  For most French Protestants, monastic life was 'catholic' at best and a throwback to the Middle Ages at worse.  To Catholics, sure of themselves, Taize was a copy of Catholic forms without the advantage of being in the 'mother Church'.  Nevertheless, the community continued to grow slowly.  Another member of Roger Schutz's family created a Protestant monastery for women in Switzerland which  also became known as an area of calm and reflection.

Shortly after the war, the community started building a church building for their prayer services.  It was called the "Church of Reconciliation" and was built largely by young French and Germans working together.  In the late 1940s, the coming of Germans to work in France was not easy neither for the French nor for the Germans, but reconciliation requires breaking down walls which have divided peoples.

While building the Church of Reconciliation, the young people talked among themselves and with members of the community who called themselves "Brothers".  Thus began a trend to come to Taize among young people, not all of whom were Christians but nearly all were seeking a meaning to life and a desire to exchange ideas.  Schutz's strength was an ability to listen rather than to preach.  He could 'hear' ideas which were not his own with patience and real concern for the person speaking.  Since this is a rare gift and the community buildings at Taize had large fields where tents could be set up, Taize became a stepping off spot for young people on the move, to talk, to pray, to exchange ideas and to gain confidence in themselves.

Brother Roger was well known for the style of his letters which were often a reflection of the discussions with young people that he was having.  "The Violence of the Peacemakers" is drawn from conversations and replies to letters with sections added from the journal of reflections which he kept.  The ideas are often simple but what was needed for the hour which was a time of passions.  Here Schutz understands the anger, the fears of those who have come to speak with him.  The anger and the fears had driven people to want to be in closed groups of the like-minded, to be among the pure.  Schutz stresses keeping lines of communication open, the need for compromise, the need to enlarge rather than to narrow the circle of those concerned.

He understands that even the peacemakers - whom Jesus called 'blessed' - carry violence within themselves.  Thus, there is the need for patience, for looking for symbols and signs of reconciliation, of the possibility to work together, of the need for each person to be a sign of unity.

In one of the last letters that he wrote recently, he said "The most obscure and humble people can play a part in bringing about a future of peace and trust.  However powerless we may seem to be, God enables us to bring reconciliation where there are oppositions, and hope where there is anxiety.  God calls us to make his compassion for human beings accessible by the way we live."

Brother Roger died as he might have wished, in the evening common prayer service in the midst of the community.  The evening prayer begins in a dark church.  Each person who enters is given a candle which he must light from someone else, and then he lights the candle of a neighbour until the whole church is lit since there were often 2000 participants in the service.  Schutz was now 90 years old and had chosen a younger successor for the now 100-strong community.  However the weight of the world was always on the doorstep.  He was stabbed in the throat by a 36-year old Romanian woman and died while still in the church.  The motivation for the killing is unclear as she has made no political or religious statement.  She too is a symbol of the violence in so many and the need to work constantly for reconciliation.

Rene Wadlow