A Community That Accepts Nothing for Itself

Taize is a monastic community whose members come from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds and live under a single rule, which was an unusual arrangement when it began and remains uncommon. Roger Schutz, a Swiss Reformed pastor, bought a house in an almost deserted Burgundian village in 1940 and used it to shelter people fleeing the war, among them Jews, until he was forced to leave in 1942; he returned in 1944, and the first brothers made lifelong commitments in 1949. The commitments are to celibacy, to simplicity of life and to life in community under a prior.

The community's economic rule is the point most often missed. It accepts no gifts, donations or inheritances for itself, and the brothers live from their own work, which has included pottery and other production sold to support the house. That refusal is not a detail of housekeeping. A community without an endowment cannot be captured by a donor, and the arrangement was designed to keep an ecumenical experiment independent of the churches whose members compose it. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church records the foundation and its ecumenical character. The brothers now come from many countries and a number live in small groups elsewhere in the world rather than in Burgundy, which the community treats as an extension of the same rule rather than as a separate mission.