L'Arche founder reveals face of Christ: Jean Vanier offers mix of love, community to the suffering - Cover Story - Biography

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 1, 2002 by John L. Allen, Jr.

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 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; 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 Phillas 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.