ROGER SCHUTZ, Prior of Taizé, created the first ecumenical community in Europe, and now, 65 years later, it numbers more than 100 men from Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Though Taizé began as a community for Protestant men, concentrating on prayer, self-supporting work and caring activities, this tiny Burgundian village has become a centre of world pilgrimage where tens of thousands of young people have sensed that reconciliation between nations and churches is being lived out in practice.

The charisma of this frail and sensitive Swiss pastor without oratorical gifts has attracted more young people than any other religious leader in Europe, Catholic or Protestant. He linked prayer and the fight against injustice using the phrase “struggle and contemplation”. Worship three times a day is part of a life which includes a farm co-operative, a printing press and studios for painting and pottery.

Roger Louis Schutz was born in 1915 in the Swiss Jura, the youngest child of a Swiss Lutheran pastor and a French mother. He suffered TB in adolescence, and during one long convalescence he reflected on the savagery of the First World War and the disputes between the churches and turned against faith. However, he went to study theology at Strasbourg and Lausanne. At the latter, where his thesis was on early European monasticism, he formed a small student community and he was ordained as a pastor.

In 1940 he went alone to the almost deserted village of Taizé near Cluny in Burgundy on the boundary between occupied and unoccupied France. Abandoned children, Jews and others fleeing the Gestapo heard about Taizé where Roger could help them to escape. In 1942 he was himself denounced and only the fortunate chance that he was away saved him from the concentration camps.

After the liberation of France Brother Roger returned to Taizé with three friends, and they founded a tiny, unendowed community. Five years later, they took the three traditional vows in a new form: celibacy, community of goods, and acceptance of an authority. Like the 12th-century founders of Fountains Abbey, they endured hardship and unpopularity, especially when they befriended German PoWs, one of whom, a young priest, was whipped to death by French women who had lost many of their men in the Resistance.

From the beginning they looked far beyond rural Burgundy to the gigantic changes in postwar society. Groups of brothers left Taizé for the first of many attempts to live in the new society at Montceaux-les-Mines. Later other groups moved to Sheffield, New York, South America and Mexico, always choosing a poor area in which to live and earn their living. In Bari they swept the streets and in Sheffield worked in the Attercliffe steel works. Roger became a close friend of Leslie Hunter, the pioneering Bishop of Sheffield, who often visited Taizé and commended its “community of dedicated young men” as living a life from which “we have much to learn”. Archbishops Ramsey and Carey also visited Taizé.

Roger always hoped for closer relations with Rome and was regarded with suspicion by some in the World Council of Churches and the French Reformed Church, who saw Taizé as a Vatican Trojan horse.

All the popes felt that Roger had an extraordinary charisma. Pius XII allowed him to plead that the dogma of the Assumption should not be promulgated simply on the basis of papal infallibility. John XXIII saw Taizé as “that little springtime” and invited the community to Rome during the sessions of Vatican II. With his usual tact, Roger did not comment on the turmoil after Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968) but he felt that winter had settled on European Christianity. His response was to welcome more and more young people to Taizé — in 1974 40,000 came for a Council of Youth. Some of the brothers protested that the crowds of visitors to Taizé made the life of contemplation impossible. In the 1960s German Christians had presented a huge new church in which the brothers inserted windows of fine stained glass where the worship and silence were compelling. In the 1970s even this church became too small, and its back wall was taken down so that tents could be erected for up to 3,000 worshippers.

The Taizé worship was both original and traditional. Fragments of many languages were used. Intercessions focused on injustice in the world, and the Taizé style of music, which had already spread to many European countries, added a new dimension. Some of the brothers still longed for quiet, but after much discussion the community agreed that with the traditional churches in such disarray, turning away the young people coming from Africa, Spain, Latin America and even the Eastern bloc countries would drive them into agnosticism. Nevertheless, the sense at Taizé that there was a large brotherhood committed to very private lives of prayer and contemplation deepened the atmosphere which the visitors came to find.

Roger’s visits to cities were astonishing. He drew thousands of young people to London in 1981 and 1987. By miracles of efficiency and goodwill, St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the cathedrals in Southwark and Methodist Central Hall were linked so that prayers, hymns and words could be relayed from each to the others. St Paul’s had its largest congregation since VE-Day — more than 9,000 worshippers with simultaneous translation in several languages. The sense of reconciliation between visitors from the East and the West was personal and moving.

When the 1995 visit to Paris attracted 25,000 people, the strain on hospitality in the parishes was too great, and Jewish communities took in Catholics from Poland, the army provided barracks and the Métro gave free transport.

Even some admirers felt there were shadows at Taizé. The place of women remained ambivalent, for instance. Married brothers were not admitted, and a few of the brothers who left to get married seemed never to be referred to again. Perhaps, too, the original commitment to political protest waned. Some felt that Roger so disliked the nitty-gritty of argument and theological study that he failed to notice the ingrained authoritarianism of the papal system, and even some Catholic theologians felt that he colluded with the recent reactionary tendencies of the Vatican.

His language seemed occasionally to become confused and unduly mystical over difficult questions. However, his writings show that he was aware of, and determined to avoid, the dangers of becoming a cult figure. The cohesion of his community with so many types of personality is a testimony to his determination and the attractiveness of his character. Roger wrote many books on prayer, and in 1988 he was awarded the Unesco Prize for Peace Education.

Roger did something to fill the gap in European Christian leadership left by the premature death of William Temple, the brevity of the pontificate of John XXIII, the hanging of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the loss of many young Christian leaders in wartime.

Taizé’s visitors always included some who were making a last attempt to find something positive in the churches. Roger would listen to them far into the night, in the church, or one of his brothers would take the visitor out on to the hillside to watch the sun set and the lights come on across the valley.

Brother Roger was stabbed to death by a Romanian woman who was among some 2,500 visitors attending evening prayers at the community which he established to to live out the spirit of the Beatitudes.

Brother Roger, Prior of Taizé, was born on May 12, 1915. He died on August 16, 2005, aged 90.