Ecumenical Commemoration
Monk of Taizé & Ecumenist
August 14 · d. 2005
also known as Roger Schutz-Marsauche
Brother Roger Schutz (1915-2005) was a Swiss Reformed pastor who founded the Taizé Community in a poor village of Burgundy in 1940, first as a wartime refuge and then as a monastic community for a divided church. Its simple sung prayer and its welcome drew young pilgrims by the hundred thousand from every tradition. He gave his life to the hope that Christians might be one, and died, at ninety, stabbed by a disturbed woman during the community's evening prayer.
Roger Schutz was born in 1915 in a Swiss village, the son of a Reformed pastor. He grew up in the French and Swiss Protestant world. As a young theologian he was haunted by two things: the suffering of Europe as the Second World War broke over it, and the scandal that the followers of one Christ had split into churches that would not pray or commune together. He came to believe that the answer to both lay in a life of prayer and reconciliation lived in common, and in 1940, at twenty-five, he set out to find a place to begin it.
He found a poor, half-abandoned village in the hills of Burgundy, in eastern France, called Taizé, close to the line that divided occupied France from the unoccupied south. He bought a house there, and almost at once it became a refuge: he hid people fleeing the Nazis, among them Jews, and helped them across the line, until in 1942 the Gestapo came and he had to flee for his own life. He returned when the war was over and gathered the first brothers around him.
What grew at Taizé was something new. Brother Roger built a monastic community for a broken church, brothers who took vows of celibacy and held all things in common, drawn first from the Protestant churches and in time from the Catholic and Orthodox as well, living together as a sign of the unity the churches had lost. He gave it a simple Rule and a simple way of prayer: short songs sung over and over until they became a kind of breathing, long silences, candlelight, the psalms.
And then, without his planning it, the young came. From the 1960s onward tens and then hundreds of thousands of young people, from every country and every church, found their way to the hill at Taizé, drawn by the silence and the singing and the welcome. Brother Roger did not lecture them or organize them; he asked them only to pray, and to carry home what they found. Come and see, he would say, in the words of the Gospel, and they came, year after year, in numbers no one could have foreseen, until Taizé had become one of the great gathering places of Christian youth in the world.
He died as he had lived, in the middle of prayer. On an August evening in 2005, during the community's evening worship, in a church full of pilgrims, a mentally disturbed woman stepped forward and stabbed him, and Brother Roger died there among his brothers, ninety years old, with the singing around him. The community he had founded did not falter; it chose his successor and went on, and the pilgrims still come over the hill in their thousands every summer. The man who had given his life to the prayer that the church might be one was taken from the world on his knees, in the very act of that prayer, with Christians of every tradition singing in the dark around him.
Brother Roger is a wholly contemporary figure, documented in his own many books and journals, in the records and witness of the Taizé Community, in decades of press coverage, and in a full biographical literature. He was born Roger Louis Schutz-Marsauche on 12 May 1915 at Provence, in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, into a Reformed pastor's family. He founded Taizé in 1940, sheltered refugees there during the war, fled the Gestapo in 1942, and returned in 1944; the first brothers made their lifelong commitments in 1949. From the late 1950s the community became a center of pilgrimage for the young, which Brother Roger came to call a pilgrimage of trust on earth. He was an observer at the Second Vatican Council and maintained close and affectionate relations with successive popes. He was killed during evening prayer at Taizé on 16 August 2005, by a Romanian woman suffering from mental illness, and is commemorated in some calendars on 14 August.
One question about Brother Roger is genuinely contested and is best stated plainly: his exact confessional standing. Born and ordained in the Reformed tradition, he moved over his lifetime toward the fullness of the Catholic faith and received communion from Catholic hands, including from the future Pope Benedict XVI; the Taizé community describes this as a progressive entry into full communion with the Catholic Church rather than a formal conversion, and the matter was discussed in his lifetime and after his death. The ambiguity is, in a way, the whole of him: a man who belonged so completely to the cause of Christian unity that he would not be confined to one side of the divisions he spent his life trying to heal.
Brother Roger is commemorated on 14 August in the calendars that keep him, near the August evening in 2005 on which he died; his liturgical color is white. He has no formal following in the older sense, and the ecumenical breadth of his life makes any single church's claim on him partial. He is honored across the traditions as a witness to reconciliation.
His monument is the community and the way of prayer it carries. Taizé remains a living monastery and one of the most visited places of Christian pilgrimage in Europe, welcoming young people from around the world week by week through the year. The songs composed there, simple phrases of Scripture and prayer sung in many languages, have passed far beyond the community into the worship of churches of every kind, so that Christians who will never see the hill in Burgundy nonetheless pray in the manner Brother Roger gave them. He is remembered as a father of modern ecumenism and, above all, as a man of prayer who died praying.
Further reading. The standard life is Kathryn Spink's A Universal Heart: The Life and Vision of Brother Roger of Taizé, which follows the story from the wartime beginnings to his death and after. Brother Roger's own meditations, among them The Sources of Taizé and Prayer for Each Day, are published by the community.
Online resources. The Taizé Community keeps the history of Brother Roger and of the community, its prayers and its songs, and the continuing life of the pilgrimage.
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Roger Schutz, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Roger Schutz-Marsauche /ʁɔˈʒeɪ ʃuːts maʁˈsoʊʃ/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31