The Brothers of Taize

For its 20th anniversary last week, the little monastery in the village of Taize, just north of the medieval monachal center of Cluny, held a major celebration. All 45 of the brothers were on hand for the occasion, half of them traveling to France from work abroad (two came from an ecumenical center at Stoughton, Mass.), and in their white, hooded robes they were an impressive token of devotion in the tiny chapel. But no outsider would readily recognize the most unusual thing about the monks of Taize, who call themselves simply members of "the community": they are not Catholic; every one of them is a Protestant.

Leveling the Obstacles. The novel experiment in Protestant monasticism was begun by Roger Schutz, 45, the ninth child of a Swiss Calvinist pastor and a French mother, who turned from agnosticism to study theology at Lausanne and Strasbourg and enter the ministry himself. In 1940, determined to serve where the need was greatest, he went to defeated France and settled in a rambling old stone building at Taize, where for two years he hid Jews from the Nazis. The Germans never caught him. When they occupied Taize, Schutz had returned to Switzerland. With four friends he continued his religious community in a Geneva apartment.

Back at Taize after the war, the group began to attract attention both from Roman Catholics and Protestants. At first, criticism was strong. To many Protestants, monkishness was an aberration of Catholics and should remain so. But over the years, most of the opposition has given way to interest and approval. Editorialized Paris' daily Le Monde: "Taize contributes to leveling the psychological and doctrinal obstacles that history has strewn in the path of Christian unity." Taize's brothers (average age: 30) are currently either Lutheran or Calvinist.

They bind themselves to three monastic principles: 1) poverty, 2) celibacy, and 3) obedience to the authority of the brother-prior, who in turn "is to consult his brothers, to listen to the feeble as well as the one with most authority, in order to seek the will of Christ for the group."

The regimen is a balance of religious devotion and work in the world, for which they exchange their white robes for ordinary clothes. Two brothers are psychologists and two are physicians, one of them to Taize and the nearby farmers. Four operate a successful printing press. One brother runs a dairy and a model farm, another is a sculptor, another a potter.

Working to Understand. One of Taize's major goals is to foster friendship and understanding between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Two at a time, the brothers travel to Italy to spend' two months at a Franciscan monastery. "Only to understand them," explains Schutz, "to love them more, to love St. Francis of Assisi more as well." Plans are under way to visit the Benedictines as well.

For their part, Roman Catholics have taken a lively interest in the Taize experiment. France's Cardinal Gerlier wrote a foreword to a book by Founder Schutz explaining Taize's Rule, a book that was brought out by a Catholic publishing house. "Tomorrow's generations," says Brother-Prior Schutz, "will have less and less patience with the division of Christians into different confessions. They will no longer tolerate the loss of energy used to legitimatize confessional positions, while --by the dizzying increase of population--men without knowledge of God grow more numerous day by day. It is not enough to love only those who confess Jesus Christ as I do and pray as I do."

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