Brother Roger

Roger Schutz (12 May 1915 – 16 August 2005), popularly known as Brother Roger (Frère Roger), was a Swiss Christian leader and monastic brother.

Born on 12 May 1915, in Provence, Vaud, Schutz was the ninth and youngest child of Karl Ulrich Schutz, a Protestant pastor from Bachs in the Zürcher Unterland in Switzerland, and his wife, Amélie Henriette Marsauche, a Huguenot from Burgundy, France.

From 1937 to 1940, Schutz-Marsauche 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.

Falling ill with tuberculosis, during his convalescence he began to feel drawn to a monastic way of life.

In 1940 Schutz founded the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy, France, serving as its first prior until his murder in 2005.

Towards the end of his life, the Taizé Community was attracting international attention, welcoming thousands of young pilgrims every week, which it has continued to do after his death.

In 1940, at the start of World War II, Schutz-Marsauche felt called to serve those suffering from the conflict, as his maternal grandmother had done during World War I.

He rode a bicycle from Geneva to Taizé, a small town near Mâcon, about 390 km southeast of Paris.

The town was then located within unoccupied France, just beyond the line of demarcation from the zone occupied by German troops.

He bought an empty house, where for two years he and his sister, Genevieve, hid refugees, both Christian and Jewish, before being forced to leave Taizé, after being tipped off that the Gestapo had become aware of their activities.

In 1944, he returned to Taizé to found the Community, initially a small quasi-monastic community of men living together in poverty and obedience, open to all Christians.

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, Brother Roger 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 a prized author 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.

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."

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'."

Although Brother Roger had a Presbyterian (Protestant) background, he received the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist at the Catholic Mass celebrated every morning in his monastery.

In addition, he received the sacrament from both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, seemingly in contravention of canonical prohibitions reserving the sacrament exclusively to those in full communion with the Catholic Church.

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."

Brother Roger thus appeared to have undertaken a step without precedent since the Protestant Reformation: entering progressively into full communion with the faith of the Catholic Church possibly without a formal "conversion" that would imply a break with his origins.

It was reported in the early 2000s that Brother Roger had in fact converted to Catholicism in 1972, when he received his First Communion from the local ordinary, the Bishop of Autun.

The journalist reporting claimed to have confirmed this with the Vatican, explaining his unfettered reception of Communion there from the sitting Pope on two different occasions.

Brother Roger was stabbed to death during the evening prayer service in Taizé on August 16, 2005, by a young Romanian woman named Luminița Ruxandra Solcan who was later deemed mentally ill and was stabbed as well in 2011.

He was stabbed several times and, though one of the brothers carried him from the church, he died shortly afterward.

The assailant was immediately apprehended by members of the congregation and was placed in police custody.

The funeral took place on 23 August 2005.

Horst Köhler, the President of Germany, and Nicolas Sarkozy, at that time Minister of the Interior 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 members of the community.

In a highly unusual move, the funeral 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.

In his homily he said, "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."

Brother Roger's successor, Brother Alois Löser, prayed for forgiveness: "With Christ on the cross we say to you, Father, forgive her, she does not know what she did."

All his life, Roger devoted himself to reconciling the different Christian denominations.

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.