ON THE NIGHT of August 16, during the evening prayer service, a Romanian woman of 36 furtively worked her way through the crowd gathered at the Church of Reconciliation in Taizé, France, and stabbed Frère Roger Schutz on the neck and back. The frail, 90 year-old monk, founder of the Taizé ecumenical community, died shortly afterward.
The first beginnings of the Taizé community date from the early 1940s, when Roger Schutz, then 25, left Switzerland, his native country, and moved to France. He had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis for a number of years, during which he had conceived the idea of founding a Christian community in which simplicity and goodwill would be practiced as the sole, fundamental essence of the Gospel.
When the Second World War broke out, he dedicated his time to helping those in need. The small town of Taizé, where he had settled in 1940, bordered on that part of France which was directly under German yoke, and was therefore an ideal place from which to collect refugees fleeing the war and Nazi persecution. Thanks to a small loan, Frère Roger bought an abandoned house, from which he was able, together with Genevieve, his sister, to offer assistance to the refugees, many of whom were Jews. In the autumn of 1941 they were warned that an informer had spied on them, and had to flee themselves.
Frère Roger returned to Taizé in 1944, but this time he was not alone. A group of young people, of various denominations, arrived with him intent on sharing the experience of living a life of pure, interdenominational Christianity.
At the end of the war the small group dedicated itself to the care of boys orphaned by the war. The presence of Genevieve proved to be providential: she became a mother for these boys. On Sundays Taizé also accepted German war prisoners...
However, it was not until 1949 that seven monks took a vow of celibacy and embraced a common life, where kindness of heart would be lived out very concretely; and where love would be at the heart of everything. The rule Frère Roger had devised was simple and non-prescriptive.
Now began a long series of struggles to gain recognition for their work in reconciling Catholics and Protestants, with appeals to popes, tussles with local bishops, compromises over who should celebrate Holy Communion, when and where. By the end of 1950s young people had started to visit, and in the early 1960s Taizé monks began discreetly contacting and visiting Christians behind the Iron Curtain.
Frére Roger had a special place in Karol Wojtyla's heart. The future head of the Church had visited Taizé twice (in 1964 and in 1968) when he was still Archbishop of Kracow, and finally as pope on October 5, 1986.
Today the community comprises about a 100 monks from 30 different nations and denominations. About 70 of them reside permanently at Taizé, the others are active in similar ecumenical communities in Bangladesh, Senegal, Brazil and South Korea. These monks are surrounded by thousands of young people and adults who see Taizé as their spiritual reference point and as a symbol of unity.
Frère Roger now rests in the small cemetery annexed to the Romanic church at Taizé. He is lying near his religious brothers who passed away in the course of the years. His grave is right next to that of his mother, Amélie, who died on December 4, 1973, during the evening prayer service of the community, at exactly the same hour in which he was stabbed to death by the mentally-disturbed woman.
Frère Roger has something in common with many saints of our Church: the message that unity is built on the capacity to give of oneself, to offer oneself as a sacrifice to God. In conclusion, his death offers the umpteenth proof of that great Christian truth: that a seed of wheat, when it falls to the ground, dies, but only to bear fruit in plenty.
Updated on October 06 2016