Brother Roger
| Brother Roger | |
|---|---|
| Frère Roger | |
 |
|
| Religion | Reformed Christianity |
| Order | Taizé Community, founder |
| Other names | Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche |
| Personal | |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Born |
May 12, 1915 Provence, Vaud, Switzerland |
| Died | August 16, 2005 (aged 90) Taizé, Saône-et-Loire, France |
Roger Schütz, popularly known as Brother Roger (French: Frère Roger; Provence, Switzerland, May 12, 1915 – Taizé, August 16, 2005), was a Swiss Christian leader and a monk. In 1940 Schütz founded the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy, France. He served as the community's 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.
He was born Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche, the ninth and youngest child of Karl Ulrich Schütz, 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, Schütz-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, at the start of World War II, Schütz-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 kilometres (240 mi) 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.
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