The Pilgrims of Taiz

Each day, beneath the greening hillside vineyards of Burgundy, the tide of pilgrims swelled larger. Along the French country roads warm with the spring sun, they came with their backpacks and sleeping bags, many on foot, others on motorbikes. By Easter Sunday, 20,000 had registered in the olive green army field tent posted as the "Taize Community Welcome Bureau." They were young-most of them still in their teens--many of them wearing sweatshirts labeled with such slogans as I FEEL FREE!, SONO TUO FRATELLO! (I am your brother) and DIESES JAHR TAIZE (This year, Taize). The youngsters had not come for some modish Jesus rock festival. The goal of this growing annual pilgrimage is the country monastery of Taize, where 70 monks live simply in the service of God.

As monasteries go, Taize is young--a full millennium younger than the nearby medieval abbey of Cluny. Moreover, though it now includes 13 Roman Catholic members, Taize was founded as a Protestant community in 1940. A Swiss theology student named Roger Schutz, then 25, came to France looking for a site for a Protestant experiment in monasticism. Schutz also wanted to help refugees from Nazism and thus chose the hamlet of Taize, near France's German-occupied zone. There he and a few colleagues spent two years hiding Jews and others fleeing persecution. Before the Germans occupied Taize, Schutz escaped to Switzerland but returned after the war to open his Evangelical Reformed Community.

For nearly two decades the monks led a quiet life. Refusing gifts, they worked at various occupations (physician, psychologist, architect, sculptor), often in nearby villages; they ran a printing press and cultivated their rich farm land. The brothers of Taize took no formal vows, but pledged themselves to celibacy, community of goods (both property and talents), and "acceptance of authority." They dressed plainly, as laymen, donning their white wool robes only for communal worship. The community grew modestly, selecting only a few of the many who sought to join.

Then in the early 1960s, without invitation, a few youthful wanderers began to stop at the monastery to join in the simple, thrice-daily prayers and help with the chores. Visitors told friends about the place, and by the summer of 1966 some 1,400 youngsters from all over Europe had gathered in tents at Taize. That year the monastery relaxed its rule against women lodgers (though singles' tents are sexually segregated), and soon the monks decided to keep the premises open year round. Last year more than 70,000 young people signed in for a few days to several months.

Most of the pilgrims share a vague spiritual hunger. "What struck me most here was the experience of finding so many people of my own age who were searching," explained Magdalene, 21, a Norwegian at the camp. Alois, a 19-year-old German, suggested that "it's not even Christianity we're searching for, since many of us are not believers. What we all share is a search for meaning." Stefano, a 15-year-old from Milan on his third visit to Taize, said that "we all push to love God." Taize's pilgrims are not so much ecumenical as postecumenical; a young man and woman who had known each other for weeks did not realize that both were Catholics until an outsider asked their religions.

Christian Life. Visitors pay for tent space and meals according to their means. Some join group discussions, especially concerning ways of living a Christian life in modern society. Others combine half-days of farm work with periods of silent contemplation; still others make more structured individual retreats under the guidance of one of the brothers. But the key element is their roughhewn communal life. "Here words and actions come together," says a French girl named Marie-Joseph. "Here we see what it is like to live and work and discuss and play together, what it is like to form a community. Many young people are not religious because they do not understand that the church should be community above all."

This August a series of conferences will begin at Taize and later move on to other countries. The meetings, to be called the Council of Youth, will explore ways that the young can help offset the injustices of the world so that, as a council slogan puts it, man will "no longer be victim to man." Brother Roger does not want the council to become a bureaucratized movement. There will be, he says, "no successions of votes, amendments, commissions, representations. It will be like an ever-widening river ... it will be what we shall have become."

He has asked his followers to suggest goals for the council, and ideas have flowed in. As collected in a new paperback, Dare to Live: The Taize Youth Experience (Seabury; $2.95), the ideas are eclectic and ambitious. Often they reflect local versions of radical Christianity. A Latin American, for instance, looks forward to a somewhat Utopian kind of social, economic and political liberation--a Christian "revolution" that will set the world aright. Others view Christian life as a "sign of contradiction" in a pagan civilization--to see their role as an example of selfless living in a selfish world. "The council will not give us an answer to everything," says one of the young organizers. "The Gospel is a call, not an answer."

Brother Roger's work with young people and his efforts toward Christian renewal were enough to win him the second annual Templeton Prize, an $80,000 award by the U.S.-based Templeton Foundation to a person "who has inspired a new thrust in religion and contributed to the knowledge and love of God." Two weeks ago at Windsor Castle, Prince Philip presented the prize. Brother Roger plans to give the money to poor young people who share the Taize ideal of "struggle and contemplation." He began by leaving part of it to youths struggling for peace in Northern Ireland and others who are working among Asian and African immigrants in Britain. "I would go to the ends of the earth," he said, "to tell and tell again of my trust in the new generation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.