Abbe Pierre, French hero, dies at 94

More often than not, when people complain about "the church"--no matter what their ideological or theological slant, whether they're inside the church or outside--what they mean is the hierarchy. Sometimes it's actually just a handful of members of the hierarchy whom they find especially irritating.

This sort of "purple ecclesiology," seeing the church almost exclusively in terms of the bishops, is a prescription for grumpiness.

The happiest Catholics I know, on the other hand, have a much broader concept of "church," whether they're conscious of it or not. For them, ',the church" is a vast universe of individuals, movements, parishes, schools, journals, international networks and all manner of other slices of life, engaged in a dizzying variety of activities, from contemplative prayer to feeding the hungry, to striving to translate the Gospel into art, politics, finance, medicine and other realms of secular culture. For every aspect of "the church" that they find frustrating or disappointing, such Catholics can usually reel off dozens of other things they find encouraging.

The story of France's famed Abbe Pierre, a priest and tireless advocate for the homeless who launched the worldwide Emmaus movement, and who died Jan. 22 at 94, offers a vivid example of the point.

A hero of the French resistance who adopted the pseudonym "Abbe Pierre" during the war, Fr. Henri-Antoine Groues, born in 1912, was the fifth of eight children of a wealthy silk manufacturer from Lyons. He launched what became the Emmaus Movement in 1949. In Emmaus communities, poor and homeless residents refurbish donated furniture and household goods and then sell them in a common shop, sharing the profits. Today, the movement numbers 327 such communities in 39 countries.

Groues became etched in the French national consciousness in 1954, when Paris was struggling with a particularly bitter winter. He went on national radio to appeal for help for the homeless, eloquently insisting, "Empty your attics, Parisians! There may be venerable things in them, but they're less venerable than the lives of babies."

"It's not enough to prevent miserable people from dying in the streets," Groues once said. "They have to be helped so they can live like human beings."

Groues remained active until the very end. Just last year, he spoke to the French parliament from his wheelchair, urging them not to roll back a law on low-income housing.

Abbe Pierre regularly topped polls as France's most respected person. In 1992 he was nominated to the French Legion of Honor, but refused it on the grounds that government policies for the homeless were inadequate. He finally accepted the honor in 2001. Groues was also repeatedly nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.

President Jacques Chirac said, "We have lost a great figure, a conscience, an incarnation of goodness." Chirac set aside Jan. 26 as a national day of mourning, including a funeral Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram of condolence in which he expressed thanks for Abbe Pierre's "action in favor of the poorest, which gave a witness of the charity which comes to us through Christ."

I spoke to Selwyn Image, an English businessman who worked in the original Emmaus community in Paris with Abbe Pierre in the 1960s as a young student, and who later was instrumental in bringing the Emmaus movement to Great Britain.

"He was a lively, energetic, charismatic man," Image recalled. "He was directed and dominated by his willpower." Image explained that even in the 1960s, Groues had to be sent for a "rest cure" for three weeks every year, in order to compensate for his long, intense hours of work.

I asked Image about the link between Groues' faith and his social commitment. He said that Abbe Pierre did not wear his faith on his sleeve, but he nevertheless radiated deep holiness. Image, who is an Anglican, said that after one meeting with Abbe Pierre, his son Nick decided he wanted to become a Catholic. (He was later received into the Catholic church.)

Image stressed, however, that Abbe Pierre was not some otherworldly figure, but a shrewd "social entrepreneur." When Image wanted to bring Emmaus to England, he recalled, he brought Abbe Pierre from France to discuss the project. They met at an old barn Image had acquired as a base of operations. The two men sat on a bale of hay in a field, Image said, and Abbe Pierre peppered him with questions about his business plan. A successful expert in international marketing, Image said it was one of the most probing business meetings he'd ever had.

The plan obviously withstood scrutiny, because Abbe Pierre sent the equivalent of 30,000 English pounds to get things off the ground--with the instruction that once Emmaus was self-sufficient, it should pass the funds along to another community that needed help.