1940

It was intolerable. The young man shook his head as he gazed at the Alps capped with snow. War had broken out across Europe. Again, the continent was descending into slaughter. For weeks he had been wandering the mountains of his home, trying to decide if he would stay in neutral Switzerland or travel to France and find a way to help those in need. Now he decided: he would travel to France and rent a house where he could offer shelter to anyone who knocked – Jews, communists, members of the resistance – even if it cost him his life.

Beyond this, there was a larger dream. For years, Roger had had the idea of a community, built on the monastic principles of chastity, poverty and obedience, in which “reconciliation would be realized, made concrete, day by day.” There would be prayer in the morning, at midday, and in the evening. In the face of another world war, this seemed more important than ever.

Shadows fell across the open fields. The mountains spoke of a deeper silence, a silence in which the voice of God would resound. He would remember this place, remember the light, as the place where he made a decision: he would seek, with his whole being, not to be understood but to understand, and to offer this understanding to whoever crossed his path. If such a way did exist, he would search for it, even to his dying day.     

Just a few weeks later he set out on his bicycle and crossed the border into France, looking for a house for his project. It was a radiant day in August, the fields and the hedgerows were bursting with new life, and cows lay down, chewing peacefully as they flicked away gnats. He’d always loved the natural world. “Fields and woods hold festival,” he would write in his diary, “the light dances between fleecy dawns and sunsets, growing softer every day.”

All he needed was a house he could rent. Over the next few days he visited several properties, including a beautiful old manor house with a large farm near the Swiss border, available at a very reasonable price. But this was out of the question, Roger admitted to himself, “It’s too near Geneva. I would be there all the time. That is not how [new] things are created.”

Another prospect presented itself in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, a large farmhouse with a magnificent view set in the lee of a hill, surrounded by pasture lands and plum red chickens clucking in the yard. Again, Roger declined. This was “a land of ease that would lull me to sleep.”

“I knew,” Roger would later recall, “that this project, which could not come from me, was to take place in the desert.” God would be the builder. Wealth and resources, beyond a certain point, would only get in the way.

His search led him at last to the village of Taizé, a poor, half-deserted village that had been hit hard by failed harvests and the war, a place where the winters were long and the solitude weighed heavily. But, he reasoned, it was near the demarcation line. Refugees from the Nazi-occupied part France would no doubt be fleeing south. And only a few miles away sat the ancient Abbey of Cluny, an influential monastery founded in AD 901 that had inspired a revival in monastic life across Europe. In Roger’s mind, it was a place associated with prayer, community, and renewal in the church.

A local peasant woman showed him around the one house in the village that was for sale. Later, she invited Roger to eat with her, and after they had finished she entreated him, “Stay here, we are all alone. There is no one left in the village and the winters are so long and cold.”

Roger recounted his experiences in Taizé to his parents when he returned home, including what the peasant woman had said. “Did anyone say anything of the kind elsewhere?” his father asked him. Upon learning that only in Taizé had anyone made such an appeal, his father said, “God speaks through the poorest of the poor. You must listen to the humility of that woman.”

1941–1942

Roger moved into the house in Taizé in January 1941, accompanied by his youngest sister, Genevie. From the beginning, life was hard. “We are short of food, we eat nettle soup,” Roger wrote in his diary. “If the bakery in Cormatin were not so understanding, we would go hungry.”

They survived with the help of the neighbors, who taught them how to plant and sow on their patch of land, and how to milk the only cow. Decades later, Roger would still remember with tenderness “old peasant women, dressed all in black, their faces lined with the rigors of existence … for they have given so much and received so little in recognition.” With such support, Roger and Genevie began to offer shelter to a steady stream of refugees fleeing south, arriving, Roger observed, “like hunted animals.”

During these years, Roger continued to ponder his dream of a community. “I know well that I will have to undertake it,” he wrote, even though he would “prefer the beaten paths, fearful … of the bitter struggles involved.”

In October 1942, Brother Roger accompanied an escapee from the Nazis to Switzerland, helping him to safety. While he was in Geneva, a letter came for him. It was no longer safe for him in Taizé. The Gestapo had twice been to his house. Someone in the village had been interrogated and denounced him.

There were some human beings, Roger would later observe, who “when the worst is asked of them will do it.” The betrayal hurt him deeply, but he resolved not to let it distract him from his vocation. He remained in Switzerland until the liberation of France in 1944, completing his studies in theology. While there, he maintained his rhythm of thrice daily prayer, soon joined by fellow students Max Thuran, Pierre Souvairan, and Daniel de Montmollin. Together, they committed themselves to celibacy and community of possessions, renewing the promise every year. During this time, Roger continued to work on a text he had begun in Taizé, trying to set down his thoughts about community and monastic life. He turned often to the Beatitudes for inspiration – these were essential texts, expressing the heart of the gospel. He composed three rules: First, be quickened by the word of God. Second, maintain inner silence in all things. Third, be filled with the spirit of the Beatitudes: joy, simplicity, and mercy. These words would be expanded and published as the community’s founding document, The Rule of Taizé.

1944

After the liberation of France, Roger and the three brothers who had joined him returned to the house in Taizé. Immediately, they asked themselves: Who now are “the most bereft”?

The answer, this time, was Germans. After the liberation, a number of prisoners of war had been interned in the villages of Mont and Chazelle, just a few miles away. On Sundays, the community was permitted to bring them to the house for a meal and a time of prayer. In his eyes, these soldiers were “just as innocent” as the refugees who had sheltered in the house a few years previously. For Roger and the community, this new act of hospitality embodied the reconciliation that was at the heart of the idea of Taizé.

“If I did not forgive on account of Christ and the gospel,” Roger later wrote, “I would do so in order to liberate myself … so as not to keep alive the bitterness that keeps us from loving the flower, the leaf, the dew.” Forgiveness was, he believed, “a key fact of existence.”

The community’s compassion was not shared by all in the surrounding area, however.  One day, three young women whose husbands had died in German concentration camps set upon one visiting prisoner with a cattle harness. In his weakened state, he died of the beating. He was a priest. As he died, he expressed only peace and forgiveness. “For some time previously,” Roger later recalled, “I had noticed in him a reflection of the sanctity of God.”

1949

On Easter Sunday 1949, seven brothers gathered in the village church to take the three traditional monastic vows, to celibacy, sharing goods in common, and obedience to the authority of the prayer. It was fitting that the ceremony should be held on the day of resurrection: the burgeoning community at Taizé would later be associated with renewal, new life, and youth, as thousands upon thousands of young people would flock to Taizé to share in the brother’s life of prayer.

There were times when Brother Roger regretted his choice to settle in the tiny village of Taizé. It was too isolated, too cold in winter, and too cut off from more populated areas. He lamented the “long line of black hills” that cut him off from the sight of his beloved Jura Mountains. He wrote often of a wish that he had settled in nearby Macon, just a stone’s throw away and more welcoming, cheerful, and alive than his valley. “God save me,” he lamented, “from this regret that has returned every day for the last year or two.”

In winter, he would feel this regret particularly heavily. “In the city,” he reflected, “there is an announcement of Christmas that appears in the shop windows. Here we have to discover the announcement of the Son of God in this land of fields and woods.” He made himself a list. “Recall our vocation to praise. Love solitude. Profit from this time of year to become perfectly oneself.”

“The only way out,” he wrote in his dairy, “is to stop making comparisons.”          

As the years passed, reconciliation remained central to the community’s mission ‒ it was, for Roger, the “purpose” of the community. To this end, the brothers hosted several ecumenical gatherings during the 1940s and 1950s to which they invited Protestants and Catholics, to discuss the issue of reconciliation between the different branches of Christianity. The brothers even dreamed of unification between the churches of the Reformation and the Catholic Church.

Many on both sides, Protestant and Catholic, were less than supportive. Once it became known that the brothers were using the tiny Romanesque church in the village for their daily prayer, the Vatican’s Holy Office decreed that the church could no longer be used for Catholic Mass. For many Protestants, the brothers of Taizé, with their vow of celibacy, seemed suspiciously Catholic. Leaders of Protestant denominations in France were displeased when Roger made efforts to reach out to the Catholic hierarchy, traveling to Rome several times to meet with various Catholic leaders.

Brother Roger met Pope Pius XII in 1949. A year earlier, the Holy Office had published a text that effectively forbade Catholics from participating in ecumenical gatherings. In an attempt to persuade the pope to become more open to dialogue with Protestants, Brother Roger entreated him to “leave a little way open, even a very narrow one and define what you consider to be the essential barriers – but leave a way forward. Do not close it all together.” Roger considered his appeal unsuccessful, but Pius XII’s successors would welcome the kind of reconciliation between Christians that Roger so desired.

1958

“You have a dark winter behind you,” Pope Pius XII proclaimed in 1958, “but a bright summer before you. May we invite you to live to the full this spring that God is granting to the world and to the church?”

The pope’s words, delivered a few months before his death, seem almost prophetic. His successor, Pope John XXIII, announced his intention to hold the council on matters of worship and doctrine that would come to be known as Vatican II. It would be a chance to reform and renew the worship of the church, to help it connect to a secularized world; in John XXIII’s words to “throw open the windows of the church, so that we can see out and people can see in.” One subject the council would address would be how to approach the divisions between the different branches of Christianity. In a text published shortly before the council, the Holy Office pronounced: “We will not put history on trial. We will not try to establish who was right and who was wrong. Responsibilities lie on both sides. All we shall say is: Let us unite!”

Pope John XXIII died in 1963, before the conclusion of the council he had begun. Years later, Roger still liked to recall his words, “Be joyful, seek the best, and let the sparrows chirp.” In John XXIII, Roger had found a kindred spirit who shared his desire for reconciliation, and John XXIII, for his part, was inspired by the community at Taizé. When he met Roger he exclaimed, “Ah Taizé, that little springtime!” The phrase has stuck, encapsulating a vibrancy that remains in Taizé to this day.

1962–1968

The pope wasn’t the only one who’d heard of the springtime blossoming in Taizé. For many years, young people had been coming uninvited to camp in the nearby hills, joining the brothers for prayer. By the 1960s, there were thousands every year, a number the community had not asked for and barely felt equipped to lead. The brothers welcomed them as best they could, inviting them to pray alongside them, and holding discussion groups on subjects such as reconciliation, communal living, and the best way to make an impact on the world.

“Why are these young people here asking me questions?” Roger reflected in his diary. “The topic of ecumenism holds no interest for them. Being Protestant or Catholic scarcely matters to them. They do not know where they stand on matters of faith.” But he continued to listen to them. There was a “prophetic quality” to their words, and he “could not turn away.”

By the 1960s there were so many visitors that the church in the village proved inadequate, and a new, modern church, The Church of Reconciliation, was built in a nearby field. Brother Roger was initially reluctant to accept this idea. He had envisioned a small group of men praying and remaining faithful to their vocation, not becoming a teacher to thousands. But, persuaded by his brothers, he gave his consent to the construction of the church and, one day as he walked by the site where the work had begun, saw that something even bigger than he had imagined was being prepared.

The morning after the grand opening of the new church, Roger saw a rainbow in the sky. “There is God’s answer,” he said to himself. “This church will not immobilize us. It’s an ark, and it will be filled.”

There was a time when the brothers considered abandoning the village of Taizé. There were simply too many young people; they could not hope to welcome them all. “Our vocation has been disfigured,” one brother told Roger. “We must flee to the desert elsewhere.” For weeks they discussed it. They considered moving to somewhere in the developing world, or somewhere in the mountains. Ultimately, though, they concluded that they could not leave. The young people who came to them had all but abandoned the church; Taizé was their last remaining link. “Were it not for this abandonment of the church,” Roger reflected years later, “our vocation might have been quite different.”

1975

The years passed. The community continued to grow, with brothers joining from England, the United States, and Indonesia. Brother Roger was now something of a celebrity, a status he found difficult to accept. “All I want,” he later told his biographer, “is to be like anyone else.” He confessed to being embarrassed when people praised him. Compliments must be “like water off a duck’s back. They must not be allowed to penetrate.”

The Taizé community continued to accept no gifts or endowments, surviving on what they were able to earn themselves. As the years passed these sources of income expanded to include pottery and milk from a small cooperative farm, as well as the sale of Brother Roger’s writings.

The young people who visited Taizé still inspired the brothers with their energy and ideas. Together they began to shape the movement’s future. The enemies were still the same – injustice, enmity, division – and the cure was still the same: reconciliation, for all the families of the earth. From these conversations came the idea that some of the brothers and groups of young people would travel to live among the poor, in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, with boat people in Hong Kong, and in the Calcutta slum where Mother Teresa lived.

Roger visited Calcutta in the autumn of 1976, working in the house for sick and abandoned children. Some died in his arms. He would see their mouths opening a fraction as they cried, but he heard nothing.

He held in his arms a girl of four months, whose mother had died in childbirth. The nurse told him that his was the first male voice the child had ever heard. She said that the child would die when winter came.

Roger obtained permission from the Indian government to bring her back to Europe. She came very close to death. For a time, she could not sleep except when she lay in Roger’s arms as he sang to her. On New Year’s Eve 1976, Roger sat in his room with the girl in his lap and wrote, “If she dies you will speak with God, perhaps even argue with him, but for now, give her up to God. Let anguish be turned into confidence.”

The girl did not die. Her name is Marie Sonaly, and she was raised in Taizé by Roger’s sister Genevie. Every day she came to sit alongside Brother Roger during midday prayer. Today, she lives in France with her husband and young daughter. She is one of a number of “the poorest of the poor” who found shelter at Taizé, the recipient of Roger’s unfailing commitment to throwing himself into what was right, no matter the cost.

2005

On August 16, 2005, Brother Roger was tragically murdered. A young woman attacked him during evening prayer in The Church of Reconciliation. Brother Roger died almost immediately. The assailant was apprehended at the scene and was later committed to a mental institution.

A year after Roger’s death, a brother of Taizé named Brother François published an article entitled, “Why Brother Roger Died,” in which he reflects on one facet of Roger’s personality that, he believes, explains why he was killed in such a seemingly senseless way. Brother Roger was an “innocent.” By this, François does not mean that Roger was without sin, or that he never got anything wrong. He means that, for Roger, the truth was self-evident, the way forward was clear, making the right decision was not the struggle it is for many people. For an innocent “the truth is obvious. It does not depend on reasoning. They ‘see’ it, in a certain sense, and it is hard for them to realize that other people have a more painstaking approach.” Brother François continues:

Brother Roger certainly fascinated people by his innocence, his instant comprehension, his look. And I think he saw, in some people’s eyes, that fascination could be transformed into mistrust or aggression. For someone who carries irresolvable conflicts within themselves, that innocence must have become intolerable. And in that case, it was not enough to insult that innocence. It had to be eliminated. Doctor Bernard de Senarclens wrote, “If the light is too bright, and I think that what emanated from Brother Roger could be dazzling, that is not always easy to bear. Then, the only solution is to extinguish the source of light by eliminating it.

“He was not killed for a cause that he was defending,” Brother François concludes. “He was killed because of what he was.”

Note on sources: Quotes from Brother Roger in this essay are taken from the biography A Universal Heart: The Life and Vision of Brother Roger of Taizé, by Katheryn Spink (SPCK, 1986), and from The Journals of Brother Roger of Taizé, volumes I and III (Ateliers et Presse de Taizé, 2021; 2024)