Showing posts with label Rome 2009. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rome 2009. Show all posts

Friday, 20 February 2009

Taize and Brother Roger...

There was some interesting conversation regarding 'Taize' while in Rome and I came across this information regarding Brother Roger's reformed background which I thought might be interesting if people are still processing what they thought.

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Roger was born the ninth and youngest child of Karl Ulrich Schütz, a Protestant pastor from Bachs in the Zürcher Unterland (Zürich Lowlands) in Switzerland, and his wife, Amélie Henriette Schütz-Marsauche, a French Protestant woman from Burgundy.
From 1937 to 1940, Roger 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.

In 1940, he rode a bicycle from Geneva to Taizé, a small town near Mâcon, about 390 kilometres (240 miles) southeast of Paris. Taizé was then in unoccupied France, just beyond the line of demarcation to the zone occupied by German troops. For two years Brother Roger hid Jewish refugees before being forced to leave Taizé. In 1944, he returned to Taizé to found the Community, initially a small quasi-monastic community of men living together in poverty and obedience.

From a Protestant background, Brother Roger undertook a step that was without precedent since the Reformation: entering progressively into a full communion with the faith of the Catholic Church without a “conversion” that would imply a break with his origins. In 1980, during a European Meeting in Rome, he said in St 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.”