CHAPTER 3: EUCHARIST IN ECUMENICAL MONASTERIES 99 pastor, he was the youngest of nine children. His mother and grandmother had a profound impact on him. His grandmother in particular inspired him to seek reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. Having witnessed the horrors of Christian nations fighting each other inWWI, she started praying in Catholic churches as an act of reconciliation. She inspired Roger’s ecumenical path, as he himself explains: Can I recall here that my maternal grandmother discovered intuitively a sort of key to the ecumenical vocation, and that she opened for me a way which I then tried to put into practice? (…) Impressed by the testimony of her life, when I was still very young, I found my own Christian identity in her steps by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without breaking fellowship with anyone.243 As a theology student, Roger Schutz was interested in monasticism and the lack thereof in the Reformed tradition. With fellow students, he organized weekly meetings that would foreshadow the prayerful community life of Taizé. Roger finished his studies in 1943, when he defended his thesis on the (in)compatibility of the Gospel and monastic life. Reformed theologian Nancy Sanders Gower argues that this thesis was not properly received by most (Catholic) writers, who, in her view, only refer to Brother Roger’s appreciation of monasticism while ignoring his aim “to critique western monasticism’s nonconformity to the Gospel and to suggest a better, reformed way of living out community.”244 As WorldWar II broke out, Roger felt that his place was not in the relatively safe context of neutral Switzerland. He desired not to be on the sidelines, but wanted to share in the difficulties of those who suffered most. He decided to leave for Burgundy, the region of his mother’s origins. After several failed attempts, Roger managed to purchase a house in the small village of Taizé. Located in Vichy, France and close to the border between the free and occupied Community of Taizé” (Fuller Theological Seminary, 2010); Jason Brian. Santos, A Community Called Taizé: A Story of Prayer, Worship and Reconciliation (IVP Books, 2008); Sabine. Laplane, Frère Roger de Taizé: avec presque rien ... (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2015). My descriptions draw on these sources and on the accounts of the brothers with whom I spoke during my visits. 243 Brother Roger, “Brother Roger’s Unfinished Letter,” Taizé website, 2005, https://www.taize.fr/en_article2964.html. 244 Gower, “Reformed and Ecumenical: The Foundations of the Community of Taizé,” 300. Cf. 300-303 about Frère Roger’s thesis “The Monastic Ideal up to St. Benedict and its Conformity to the Gospel.”
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