Frère Roger

Frère Roger
Brother Roger at prayer.
Born May 12, 1915(1915-05-12)
Provence, Switzerland
Died August 16, 2005(2005-08-16) (aged 90)
Taizé, Saône-et-Loire,
France
Cause of death Murder (stabbing)
Nationality Swiss
Other names Brother Roger
Years active 1944-2005
Known for Founder of the Taizé Community
Religion Protestant
Awards Templeton Prize (1974)
UNESCO Prize for Peace Education
(1988)

Frère Roger (Brother Roger) (Provence, Switzerland, May 12, 1915 - Taizé, August 16, 2005), baptised Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche, also known as Brother Roger, was the founder and prior of the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community.

Contents

Background

Roger was born the ninth and youngest child of Karl Ulrich Schütz, a Protestant pastor from Bachs in the Zürcher Unterland (Zürich Lowlands) in Switzerland, and his wife, Amélie Henriette Schütz-Marsauche, a French Protestant woman from Burgundy.

From 1937 to 1940, Roger studied Reformed theology in Strasbourg and Lausanne, where he was a leader in the Swiss Student Christian Movement, part of the World Student Christian Federation.

In 1940, he rode a bicycle from Geneva to Taizé, a small town near Mâcon, about 390 kilometres (240 miles) southeast of Paris. Taizé was then in unoccupied France, just beyond the line of demarcation to the zone occupied by German troops. For two years Brother Roger hid Jewish refugees before being forced to leave Taizé. In 1944, he returned to Taizé to found the Community, initially a small quasi-monastic community of men living together in poverty and obedience.

Since the late 1950s, many thousands of young adults from many countries have found their way to Taizé to take part in weekly meetings of prayer and reflection. In addition, Taizé brothers make visits and lead meetings, large and small, in Africa, North and South America, Asia, and in Europe, as part of a “pilgrimage of trust on earth”.

The spiritual leader always kept a low profile, rarely giving interviews and refusing to permit any "cult" to grow up around himself. Prior to his death, he was due to give up his community functions because of his advanced age and ill-health which had seen him suffer from fatigue and often use a wheelchair.

Brother Roger was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1988 and wrote many books on prayer and reflection, asking young people to be confident in God and committed to their local church community and to humanity. He also wrote books about Christian spirituality and prayer, some together with Mother Teresa with whom he shared a cordial friendship.

Ecumenical ideals

Brother Roger at prayer, 2003.

All his life, Roger devoted himself to reconciling the different Christian churches. He especially addressed Christian youth. Part of his appeal may have been his dislike of formal preaching, while encouraging a spiritual quest as a common endeavor. During a Taizé gathering in Paris in 1995, he spoke to more than 100,000 young people who were sitting on the floor of an exhibition hall. "We have come here to search," he said, "or to go on searching through silence and prayer, to get in touch with our inner life. Christ always said, Do not worry, give yourself." [1]

From a Protestant background, Brother Roger undertook a step that was without precedent since the Reformation: entering progressively into a full communion with the faith of the Catholic Church without a “conversion” that would imply a break with his origins. In 1980, during a European Meeting in Rome, he said in Saint Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope John Paul II: “I have found my own identity as a Christian by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without breaking fellowship with anyone.”

He took Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist every morning at the Catholic Mass in Taizé, and he received the sacrament from both the current and former Pope, seemingly in contravention of canonical prohibitions on administering the sacrament to those not in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.[1] According to Cardinal Walter Kasper this was accomplished as though there was a tacit understanding between Brother Roger and the Catholic Church "crossing certain confessional" and canonical barriers through what brother Roger called a gradual enrichment of his faith with the foundations of the Catholic Church including "the ministry of unity exercised by the bishop of Rome." [1]

Death

Brother Roger was stabbed to death during the evening prayer service in Taizé on August 16, 2005 by Luminiţa Ruxandra Solcan. He was stabbed several times and, though one of the brothers carried him from the church, he died shortly afterwards. The assailant was immediately apprehended by members of the congregation and was placed in police custody.

His stabbing led many who already considered him a saint to think of him as a martyr, even though there is no clear link between his faith and the crime.

The funeral took place on August 23, 2005. Horst Köhler, President of Germany, and Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior of France (and later elected President of France), were in attendance. Brother Roger's community and friends attended the liturgy in the vast monastery church at Taizé, while thousands more followed it on a huge screen in fields outside the church. Brother Roger's simple wooden coffin, a wooden icon lying upon it, was carried into the church by brothers.

In a highly unusual move, the funeral of this (presumably still) Protestant monk was presided over by a Catholic cardinal. Walter Kasper, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, who celebrated the Mass with four priest-brothers of Taizé concelebrating, said in a homily, "Yes, the springtime of ecumenism has flowered on the hill of Taizé." In reference to Brother Roger's concern for social justice, Cardinal Kasper said "Every form of injustice or neglect made him very sad". Br. Roger's successor, Br. Alois prayed for forgiveness: "With Christ on the cross we say to you, Father, forgive her, she does not know what she did."

Successor

In 1998, Brother Roger had designated Brother Alois Löser, a German who had originally come to Taizé as a youth and became one of the brothers, as his successor. This was confirmed by the community and in January 2005, it was announced that Br. Alois would soon be taking Br. Roger's place as Prior of Taizé, but this had not yet occurred at the time of Brother Roger's death, when Br. Alois was attending the World Youth Day celebration in Cologne, Germany. Br. Alois became Prior shortly thereafter.

Publications

Editions, listed alphabetically, as found in the Library of Congress Catalog shortly after his death:

Awards and honours

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Magister, Sandro Was the Founder of Taizé Protestant, or Catholic? A Cardinal Solves the Riddle WWW.CHIESA August 25, 2008

External links

Recipients of the Charlemagne Prize

Richard Nikolaus Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi (1950) · Hendrik Brugmans (1951) · Alcide de Gasperi (1952) · Jean Monnet (1953) · Konrad Adenauer (1954) · Sir Winston S. Churchill (1956) · Paul Henri Spaak (1957) · Robert Schuman (1958)  · George C. Marshall (1959) Joseph Bech (1960) Walter Hallstein (1961) Edward Heath (1963) Antonio Segni (1964) Jens Otto Krag (1966) Joseph Luns (1967) The European Commission (1969) François Seydoux de Clausonne (1970) Roy Jenkins (1972) Don Salvador de Madariaga (1973) Leo Tindemans (1976) Walter Scheel (1977) Konstantinos Karamanlis (1978) Emilio Colombo (1979) Simone Veil (1981) King Juan Carlos of Spain (1982) The People of Luxembourg (1986) Henry A. Kissinger (1987) François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl (1988) Frère Roger (1989) Gyula Horn (1990) Václav Havel (1991) Jacques Delors (1992) Felipe González Márquez (1993) Gro Harlem Brundtland (1994) Franz Vranitzky (1995) Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (1996) Roman Herzog (1997) Bronisław Geremek (1998) Anthony (Tony) Charles Lynton Blair (1999) William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton (2000) György Konrád (2001) The euro (2002) Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (2003) Pat Cox (2004) Extraordinary prize: Pope John Paul II (2004) Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (2005) Jean-Claude Juncker (2006) Javier Solana (2007) Angela Merkel (2008) Andrea Riccardi (2009) Donald Tusk (2010) Jean-Claude Trichet (2011)
Templeton Prize laureates

Mother Teresa (1973) • Frère Roger (1974) • Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1975) • Leo Joseph Suenens (1976) • Chiara Lubich (1977) • Thomas Torrance (1978) • Nikkyo Niwano (1979) • Ralph Wendell Burhoe (1980) • Cicely Saunders (1981) • Billy Graham (1982) • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1983) • Michael Bourdeaux (1984) • Alister Hardy (1985) • James I. McCord (1986) • Stanley Jaki (1987) • Inamullah Khan (1988) • Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker & George MacLeod (1989) • Baba Amte & Charles Birch (1990) • Immanuel Jakobovits (1991) • Kyung-Chik Han (1992) • Charles Colson (1993) • Michael Novak (1994) • Paul Davies (1995) • Bill Bright (1996) • Pandurang Shastri Athavale (1997) • Sigmund Sternberg (1998) • Ian Barbour (1999) • Freeman Dyson (2000) • Arthur Peacocke (2001) • John Polkinghorne (2002) • Holmes Rolston III (2003) • George Ellis (2004) • Charles Townes (2005) • John D. Barrow (2006) • Charles Taylor (2007) • Michał Heller (2008) • Bernard d'Espagnat (2009) • Francisco J. Ayala (2010)