The Taize Community

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.

Taize is known far beyond monastic circles for two things. The first is its music: short phrases, usually a single line of text in Latin or another language, harmonised simply and repeated for as long as the prayer lasts. The form was developed for a congregation that changes every week, that has no shared language and that cannot rehearse, and it solved that problem so effectively that the chants are now sung in churches of almost every tradition worldwide. The second is the number of young people who come. From the 1960s the community began receiving visitors in large numbers for weeks of common prayer, silence, simple work and small group discussion, and it also organises an annual European meeting hosted in a different city each new year. Neither of those was a plan the community set out with; both grew out of people arriving.

Brother Roger was killed during evening prayer in August 2005 by a woman who was mentally ill, and the community continued under the prior he had already designated, which the brothers have described as the arrangement he made precisely so that the community would not depend on him. Taize is a living community and the atlas describes it rather than commending it.