Calvinists in Cowls

In the little French hilltop monastery of Taize, a retreat was in progress last week. At 3:30 a.m. the cowled, white-robed brothers filed into the dwarfish Romanesque church. Their young voices softly droned the singsong of the night office. But they chanted in French instead of Latin, and a plain, white Communion table stood before the altar. For these monks were not Catholics but Calvinists.

Taize is the first Protestant monastic community in France. The average age of its ten resident members is 27--four of them are ordained Calvinist ministers, two are farmers, the remaining four are doctors. The oldest among them is pale, large-eyed Pastor Roger Schutz, 33.

The Benevolent Spinster. Roger Schutz was born in Switzerland, the son and grandson of Calvinist clergymen. Though he was a belligerent freethinker during his school days, Schutz returned to the fold and studied theology at Strasbourg and Lausanne, after one of his relatives "miraculously" recovered from an illness. At Lausanne in 1939 he gathered around him a few fellow students who were eager to introduce a "reformed monasticism" into Protestantism. Young Roger Schutz went to France looking for a place to organize a disciplined, communalized way of life.

He met and impressed a pious French Calvinist spinster, who offered him her chateau as a gift. When he ruefully turned it down as unsuitable, she offered to buy him any one he wanted. Finally Schutz decided on the dark, rambling 17th Century chateau at Taize--a tiny village near Cluny.

During the Vichy regime, Schutz and his friends were busy hiding Jewish refugees and giving shelter to fugitives from the occupied zone. When the Germans occupied all of France and the Gestapo closed down the chateau at Taize, Schutz went to Geneva. There he talked over his ideas with two like-minded Swiss friends --Technical Student Pierre Souverain and Theologian Max Thurian.

One thing bothered them: Did Protestantism oppose the monastic life? They were relieved to find that Luther had written: "One must correct unholy opinions and worship, but all the while retain colleges and monasteries." When Lausanne's great Calvinist theologian, Jean de Saussure, assured Schutz that Calvin himself would not have disapproved, they decided to go ahead.

The Impossible Return. Members of the Evangelical Reformed Community of Cluny, as it is called, take no formal vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But their way of life comes to almost the same thing. They are pledged not to marry, to obey "other brothers," to allow themselves only small sums of spending money. Dressed in blue denim trousers, sandals and peasant-style blouses, they work in the nearby fields to such good purpose that the community is now selfsupporting.

They have adopted 20 French war orphans, who live in outbuildings on the monastery grounds. Pastor Schutz has hopes that members of the community may eventually go forth into the world to do further social work.

Other French Protestants look upon the experiment at Taize with friendly, if skeptical, interest. Though Schutz and his colleagues have frankly modeled their community on the rules of St. Francis and St. Benedict, their staunch Calvinism has never been questioned. Says Pastor Schuc": "It is impossible to return to Rome, because Rome is not reformed."

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