Each day, beneath the greening hillside vineyards of Burgundy, the tide of pilgrims swelled larger. Along the French country roads warm with the spring sun, they came with their backpacks and sleeping bags, many on foot, others on motorbikes. By Easter Sunday, 20,000 had registered in the olive green army field tent posted as the "Taizé Community Welcome Bureau." They were young-most of them still in their teens—many of them wearing sweatshirts labeled with such slogans as I FEEL FREE!, SONO TUO FRATELLO! (I am your brother) and DIESES JAHR TAIZE (This year, Taizé). The youngsters had not come for some modish Jesus rock festival. The goal of this growing annual pilgrimage is the country monastery of Taizé, where 70 monks live simply in the service of God.
As monasteries go, Taizé is young—a full millennium younger than the nearby medieval abbey of Cluny. Moreover, though it now includes 13 Roman Catholic members, Taizé was founded as a Protestant community in 1940. A Swiss theology student named Roger Schutz, then 25, came to France looking for a site for a Protestant experiment in monasticism. Schutz also wanted to help refugees from Nazism and thus chose the hamlet of Taizé, near France's German-occupied zone. There he and a few colleagues spent two years hiding Jews and others fleeing persecution. Before the Germans occupied Taizé, Schutz escaped to Switzerland but returned after the war to open his Evangelical Reformed Community.
For nearly two decades the monks led a quiet life. Refusing gifts, they worked at various occupations (physician, psychologist, architect, sculptor), often in nearby villages; they ran a printing press and cultivated their rich farm land. The brothers of Taizé took no formal vows, but pledged themselves to celibacy, community of goods (both property and talents), and "acceptance of authority." They dressed plainly, as laymen, donning their white wool robes only for communal worship. The community grew modestly, selecting only a few of the many who sought to join.
Then in the early 1960s, without invitation, a few youthful wanderers began to stop at the monastery to join in the simple, thrice-daily prayers and help with the chores. Visitors told friends about the place, and by the summer of 1966 some 1,400 youngsters from all over Europe had gathered in tents at Taizé. That year the monastery relaxed its rule against women lodgers (though singles' tents are sexually segregated), and soon the monks decided to keep the premises open year round. Last year more than 70,000 young people signed in for a few days to several months.