Weekly Message

On Saturday evening all the clergy in the team along with a number of others from our churches and others on Bedford, will be heading off to France to spend a week with the Taizé Community. For Fr. Paul this will be 40 years since he first went!

The Taizé community is an ecumenical monastic order founded after WWII by Brother Roger. Brother Roger first came to Taizé in 1940 when, at the age of twenty-five, he left Switzerland to go and live in France to assist people suffering during the war. He settled in the small village of Taizé which was quite close to the demarcation line dividing France in two. Thanks to a modest loan Brother Roger bought a house with outlying buildings that had been uninhabited for years. He asked his sister, Genevieve, to come and help him offer hospitality and they sheltered refugees fleeing the war.

Material resources were limited: there was no running water, so for drinking water they had to go to the village well and the food was simple, mainly soups made from corn flour bought cheaply at the nearby mill. In 1942 they were warned that their activities had been found out and everyone had to leave. Brother Roger then lived in Geneva where he began a common life with his first brothers. They were able to return to Taizé in 1944.

In 1945, a young lawyer from the region set up an association to take charge of children who had lost their parents in the war. He suggested to the brothers that they welcome a certain number of them in Taizé. A men’s community could not receive children. So Brother Roger asked his sister Genevieve to come back to take care of them and become their mother.  On Sundays, the brothers also welcomed German prisoners-of-war interned in a camp nearby Taizé.  Gradually other young men came to join the original group, and on Easter Day 1949, there were seven of them who committed themselves together for their whole life in celibacy and to a life together in great simplicity.

Today the community is made up of over one hundred brothers from around thirty different countries, both Catholics and those from various Protestant backgrounds. By its very existence the community is a ‘parable of community’ that wants its life to be a sign of reconciliation between divided Christians and separated peoples. The brothers of the community live solely by their work. They do not accept donations. In the same way they do not accept personal inheritances for themselves; the community gives them to the very poor.