'France's Mother Teresa' dead at 94; supported married men, women as priests

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

France’s most famous Catholic priest, a national icon of concern for the poor and homeless and the founder of the worldwide Catholic “Emmaus” movement, has died at 94. “L’Abbè Pierre,” whose full name was Fr. Henri-Antoine Groues, had been hospitalized since January 15 with a pulmonary infection.

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Read more from John Allen on “L’Abbè Pierre” at http://ncrcafe.org/node/865.
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A man often styled as France’s “Mother Teresa” for his selflessness and social commitment, Groues also caused a stir in the French church in 2005 when, at the age of 93, he published a set of reflections confessing that he had not always maintained his vow of celibacy, supporting the ordination of married priests and women as priests, and favoring the recognition of gay unions.

Henri-Antoine Groues, born in 1912, was the fifth of eight children of a wealthy silk manufacturer from Lyons. At 18, he signed over his inheritance and entered a friary of the Capuchin Franciscans. After a bout with tuberculosis, he left the Capuchins and became a priest of the Grenoble diocese.

After the fall of France during World War II, he joined the Resistance, helping Jewish refugees cross the Swiss border. He operated a laboratory for forging documents, and even took part in surprise raids against German and Italian barracks. He was captured by the Italians, but escaped to the mountains where he joined the famed Vercors Maquis and founded an underground newspaper. The Germans chased him to Lyons, where he took the pseudonym “L’Abbè Pierre” and went to work forging identity cards.

In 1946, “L’Abbè Pierre” became a member of the post-war National Assembly. He rented an apartment in a Paris suburb, and soon took in a young couple with a baby who had been evicted from their home and had nowhere else to go. Soon his apartment overflowed with poor and homeless Parisians, and Groues decided he had to find better quarters.

He bought a barracks building in an abandoned prisoner of war camp, charging the homeless 15¢ for a night’s lodging, and soon he was taking in some 5,000 people a year. On the suggestion of an ex-rag collector, Groues organized a system of collecting rubbish and refurbishing it to give the homeless a way to make enough money to get a fresh start.

In order to buy a truck for his expanding operation, Groues went on a new French game show called “Double or Nothing.” By virtue of being able to identify the initials “FAO” as representing the brand-new United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, he won the equivalent of $700.

He launched what became the Emmaus Movement in 1949.

Groues became etched in the French national consciousness in 1954, when Paris was struggling with a particularly bitter winter. The priest 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.”

In Emmaus communities, residents work full time refurbishing donated furniture and household goods and then selling them in a common shop. Today, the movement numbers 327 such communities in 39 countries.

“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.

In overwhelmingly secular France, where more than 50 percent of the nation reports never attending religious services, Groues remained a strong point of pride for French Catholicism. Though the Emmaus movement accepts people of all backgrounds – “You’ll get your soup whether you believe or not,” Groues said – he had a brick chapel behind his house where he would celebrate daily Mass.

“L’Abbè Pierre” regularly topped polls as France’s most respected person, and was routinely compared to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In 1992 he was inducted into the French Legion of Honor, and was repeatedly nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.

President Jacques Chirac said yesterday in a statement, “We have lost a great figure, a conscience, an incarnation of goodness.”

In October 2005, Groues released a set of reflections entitled Mon Dieu...pourquoi?, in which he frankly acknowledged that his vow of priestly celibacy had not insulated him from sexual temptation.

“It happened that every now and then, I fell,” he wrote.

“I never had regular relationships, because I never allowed sexual desire to put down roots. I’ve known the experience of sexual desire and its occasional fulfillment, but this fulfillment was in truth a source of dissatisfaction, because I never felt sincere. … I’ve understood that in order to be fully satisfied, sexual desire needs to express itself in a sentimental relationship, tender, trusting. That kind of relationship was denied to me by my choice of life. I would have only made both the woman and myself unhappy, tormented between two irreconcilable options for my life,” Groues wrote.

Groues wrote that in his opinion, both married and celibate priests are able to consecrate themselves completely to their vocations, and that priests should therefore have the option to marry.

Groues also supported the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood, writing that the ban “presupposes that this practice is not in conformity with the very substance of the Christian faith.”

“The principal argument given in support of this view,” he wrote, “is that Jesus did not choose women among his apostles. But for me this argument is not at all theological. Instead, [that choice] has sociological roots.”

On the subject of homosexuality, Groues said he was not in favor of using the term “marriage,” which, he said, “has roots too deep in the collective consciousness as a union between a man and a woman.” He supported recognition of same-sex “pacts.” Groues said the question of adoption rights for gay couples was “complex,” and could not be approached “lightly.”

Groues had earlier stirred controversy in 1996, when he refused to disavow a friend, Roger Garaudy, a French convert to Islam, who published a book casting doubt on the Holocaust and arguing against the existence of Israel.