Cover
story
L’Arche founder reveals face of Christ
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
I recently bumped into Jean Vanier, the 74-year-old founder of the
L’Arche movement that fosters community life with people with
developmental disabilities, during a Catholic-Orthodox dialogue in Terni, just
north of Rome. Our encounter was unexpected, and Vanier’s face broke into
the broad smile that is a trademark upon seeing someone he recognizes in even
the most vague way.
The tall, silver-haired Vanier, a French Canadian perfectly
bilingual in French and English, cuts a dashing figure despite the blue
“Maytag repairman” style windbreaker he always wears in public. Yet
when he grins, he can’t help looking slightly like a senior citizen
version of Gomer Pyle.
Vanier and I had already spoken several times, at a string of Rome
press conferences, at this summer’s World Youth Day in Toronto, and just
days before at an international congress of his Faith and Light initiative near
Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the pope. He knew I was preparing a
feature about him and his movements, and asked how my interviews with American
Faith and Light delegates had gone.
“They want to see you a saint one day,” I said,
interested to see how he might react.
Vanier’s smile died a quick death.
“That’s a way of destroying you,” he said,
scowling. “You know what Dorothy Day said about that.”
Taking the cue, I repeated the famous line from the founder of the
Catholic Worker movement, whose cause for canonization has been launched by the
New York archdiocese: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be
dismissed that easily.”
“That’s right,” Vanier said, drawing out each
syllable. “That’s right.”
It was all vintage Vanier -- humble, gentle, yet intense, with
enough political realism to keep his deep Catholic piety from seeming
artificial.
Jean Vanier is, by any standard, one of the most remarkable people
in contemporary Catholicism. Like Mother Teresa before him, he carries the rare
burden of being both a public figure and someone widely flagged as a saint in
his own lifetime.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, on Sept. 10, 1928, Vanier is the son
of the 19th governor-general of Canada, George Philias Vanier, and his wife,
Pauline Archer Vanier. Both were staunch Catholics, and sainthood causes for
both have been launched in Canada.
His father was also the Canadian ambassador to France at the end
of the Second World War, where the young Vanier visited him in January 1945 and
saw ex-inmates arriving from Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. He later
described “their white and blue uniforms … They were skeletons. That
vision has remained with me -- what human beings can do to other human beings,
how we can hurt and kill each other.”
At the age of 13, Vanier applied and was admitted to the Royal
Naval College in England. After serving as an officer in the Royal Navy, as
well as serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, he resigned in 1950.
Vanier then joined a small community, l’Eau Vive, directed by
French Dominican Fr. Thomas Philippe. L’Eau Vive was a community of
students, predominantly lay, situated in a poor area near Paris. The aim was to
foster prayer and the study of metaphysics. Shortly afterwards, Vanier was
asked to direct the community when ill health forced Philippe’s
resignation.
Vanier did so for six years; then he too stepped down.
Vanier next obtained a doctoral degree in philosophy at
l’Institut Catholique in Paris in 1962, focusing on contemplation,
friendship and justice in Aristotle’s thought. He taught for a period at
St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.
In the meantime Philippe had become a chaplain for mentally
handicapped men living at Le Val Fleuri, a large institution in Trosly-Breuil,
about an hour by train from Paris. Vanier moved to Trosly-Breuil where he
bought a small, dilapidated house that he called l’Arche, the Ark
-- Noah’s Ark. After visiting a number of institutions, asylums and
psychiatric hospitals, as well as Le Val Fleuri, Vanier welcomed two mentally
handicapped men, Raphael and Philippe, into his home on Aug. 4, 1964.
Thus L’Arche was born. It is a community born of a series of
dyads, pairing one person with a disability, another without.
Its charter says the community, in the Roman Catholic tradition,
“seeks to respond to the distress of those who are too often rejected, and
to give them a valid place in society.” A guiding principle is that
“everyone is of unique and sacred value” with a “right to
friendship, to communion and to a spiritual life.”
Vanier says that the aim of L’Arche is not to change the
world, “but to create little places ... where love is possible.”
‘A place of pain’
Despite the lofty language, Vanier is no public relations flack --
he knows community gets tough.
“I bet many of you have communities in difficulty,” he
said to a recent meeting of Faith and Light members. “In fact, I hope you
do. Community, real community, is painful. I’ve been doing this 38 years,
and this is what I’ve learned … a community is a place of
pain.”
Vanier’s vision got international attention in the
mid-’80s when Fr. Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest whose spiritual
self-help books have sold in the millions, settled in a L’Arche community
in Ontario, Canada. Nouwen had suffered a nervous collapse from the pressures
of worldly success, and his friend Vanier suggested L’Arche as a place he
might find relief.
L’Arche has grown to some 104 communities in more than 30
countries on five continents. Vanier is no longer its director, but still lives
in a L’Arche community in France.
Vanier founded the Faith and Sharing movement in 1968, which
brings people with developmental disabilities and others together once a month
for gospel readings and prayer. In 1971, he and Marie Hélène
Mathieu founded Faith and Light, which holds regular get-togethers for people
with disabilities, their parents and friends.
Vanier and Mathieu founded Faith and Light after taking a group of
severely disabled persons on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where they were shocked
at the hostile response. Some townspeople and pilgrims actually suggested that
people this badly disabled should not be taken out in public.
Pat and Frank Dani were two of the Americans at the international
Faith and Light conference in the hills outside Rome. They have a
developmentally disabled daughter, and say Vanier’s approach helped them
learn to see her in a different light.
“I used to sort of pity her, feel sorry for her,” Frank
said. “But through Faith and Light I’ve come to understand how
incredibly gifted she is, how special she is. Wherever we go now, the action
focuses on her. She’s got a naturalness, a gift for people, that’s
amazing.”
That’s the Vanier spirit -- finding gifts where others see
tragedy.
“Faith and Light is an experience that was born from
suffering,” Vanier told NCR. “The terrible suffering of
parents, of people with handicaps … the aim of being Christian is to
reveal the compassionate face of Christ.”
A theology of the body
Almost without trying, out of necessity rather than any taste for
dogmatics, Vanier has developed a sophisticated theology of the body to explain
his ministry. While early Christians spoke of fides ex auditu, or
“faith from hearing,” he says his communities cultivate fides ex
corpore -- faith transmitted through the body, through touch.
Vanier told the story of his relationship with one of the original
members of the L’Arche community.
“He does not understand much, but he does understand whether
we touch him with love,” he said. “Our bodies are called to be the
instruments of grace. We must learn to touch with tenderness. Touch has become
sexualized in our culture, but it is so vitally important to reveal to people
their value and to give them security.”
Vanier, true to his word, is not bashful about placing his hands
on you while you talk, even applying a quick rub of the shoulders that can be
remarkably penetrating. He does so without asking, and without blushing.
One surprise about Vanier’s extensive circle of activities is
the deep ecumenical dimension. There is a L’Arche community in Russia
composed of Russian Orthodox believers, and there are Orthodox, Protestant and
Anglican Faith and Light groups as well.
Vanier himself, however, is deeply rooted in the Catholic
tradition. (He was a seminarian, but abandoned his studies shortly before
ordination.) He is a regular at Vatican events, and is clearly a favorite of
John Paul II. After his most recent audience with the pope in September,
L’Osservatore Romano published a photo of Vanier with his head
buried in the pope’s arms as the two men wrapped one another in a deep
embrace.
I pulled Vanier aside in Rome and asked if the pope had whispered
something special to him in that moment. “No, and I probably wouldn’t
tell you if he had,” Vanier said curtly, as if I had invaded a special
moment that belonged just to the two of them.
I once asked Vanier if John Paul, now that he is physically weak
and broken, is a more powerful role model for his communities. “The pope
has never been more beautiful,” Vanier responded.
Part of what John Paul must admire is that, like Dorothy Day and
other social reformers anchored in a muscular traditional Catholicism, Vanier
does not play fast and loose with doctrine or church discipline.
“To bring social activism and faith together is very
complex,” he said in a keynote talk to the Faith and Light congress Sept.
28. “Lots of things begin this way, but gradually they become exclusively
spiritual and say goodbye to the poor, or it’s all social activity and the
faith disappears.”
No ecclesiastical games
Vanier turns gruff when one tries to push him on church politics,
like women’s ordination. “Let’s get on with it and start being
with the poor,” he said.
Anyone who knows Vanier realizes he is not playing ecclesiastical
games. When he says his vocation is “revealing the face of Jesus to people
in pain,” it rings true.
Vanier is, though one almost shrinks from the word for fear of
overuse, a holy man.
Yet his is not, it must be said, a fluffy, feel-good holiness of
the “Touched By An Angel” sort. It is closer to Rudolph Otto’s
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a sense of the divine that is as
terrifying as it is consoling. Terrifying, because standing next to Vanier is
in some sense to stand in judgment, to contemplate the hollowness of one’s
own life compared to his heroism, to feel an overpowering sense that you should
change your ways before it’s too late. Being with Vanier is both inspiring
and, at times, disconcerting and even disorienting, the way people used to
respond to Mother Teresa.
Most of Vanier’s admirers have no problem acknowledging his
sanctity, even if, a bit like Catholic Worker attitudes about Day, they may
feel some ambiguity about a formal canonization somewhere down the road.
Mike Ciletti, a chaplain and permanent deacon in Colorado Springs,
Colo., pondered Vanier’s possible sainthood when I put the question to
nine American Faith and Light members at the congress outside Rome Sept. 29.
Ciletti eventually said that Vanier himself would argue that it’s the
developmentally disabled persons themselves who are the real saints, who know
how to experience and to project joy despite their sometimes agonizing
conditions. They’re the ones who deserve a halo.
“Maybe that’s the final proof of Vanier’s
saintliness,” I ventured. No one in the room disagreed.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
Related Web sites
L’Arche
Canada
www.larchecanada.org
L’Arche
USA
www.larcheusa.org
Faith and
Light
www.faithandlight.net
National Catholic Reporter, November 01,
2002
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