Jacques Loew | |
---|---|
Personal | |
Born | |
Died | 14 February 1999[a] Échourgnac, France | (aged 90)
Religion | Catholic Church |
Known for | Worker-priest movement |
Organization | |
Order | Order of Preachers |
Senior posting | |
Ordination | 1939 |
Jacques Loew OP (31 August 1908 – 14 February 1999) was a French Dominican friar and priest, who founded both the Mission ouvrière Saints-Pierre-et-Paul and – with René Voillaume – the School of the Faith in Fribourg, Switzerland. He is best known for starting the worker-priest movement.
Jacques Loew was born in 1908 in Clermont-Ferrand, the only child of August Pierre Loew, a medical doctor, and Jeanne Maximilienne (née Gerber).[2] The family comprised middle-class socialists and Dreyfusards with anti-clerical sentiments.[3] Loew grew up in Nice and, although he was baptized Catholic, he attended Protestant Sunday school.[2] He later studied law and political science in Paris, before finishing his schooling at Sanatorium Universitaire in Leysin, Switzerland, due to a case of tuberculosis.[2] When his schooling was complete, he registered with the bar in Nice, but his nascent law career was disrupted by another bout of tuberculosis.[2][6] Returning to the sanatorium in Leysin for medical treatment, he converted to Catholicism at 24 after reading the Gospel.[6] Prior to his official reception into the Catholic Church, he traveled to La Valsainte, a Carthusian monastery in Gruyère, Switzerland, where he was particularly impressed by the dom, Jean-Baptiste Porion , who further solidified his conversion and encouraged him to meet Stanislas Fumet and his wife, Ainouta, who encouraged him further.[2] He was fully received into the Catholic Church in October 1932, with the Fumets serving as his sponsors.[2]
In 1934, Loew joined the Dominican Order, becoming a friar in 1935 before being ordained a priest in 1939.[2][6][1] Soon after, he began working alongside Louis-Joseph Lebret with the Economie et Humanisme group in Lyons,[6] as one of its founders.[2] Lebret instructed him to learn about the working class and study its condition in order to better be able to minister to it, particularly to the French secularized working class.[1][3][2][6] In 1941, he began to work in Marseilles as a longshoreman, which gave him a lasting impression about the distance between working people and the priesthood.[1][6][3][5] Between 1942 and 1944, Loew and about ten priests established the Popular Family Movement (Mouvement populaire des familles, MPF) and four of them requested the Bishop of Marseilles, Jean Delay , authorize them to begin evangelizing "in the framework of a missionary parish".[2] In November 1945, Delay entrusted the parish of Saint-Louis , a working-class neighborhood north of Marseilles, to two diocesans – Jean Gentile and Georges Hallauer – and two Dominican religious – Loew and André Piet.[2] The presence of factories and communists as well as its proximity to the docks and the absence of any strong religious communities made it appeal to the worker-priest missionaries.[2]
In 1947, Loew was entrusted with the parish at La CabucellePort-de-Bouc,[4] which contained several secular priests who were sympathetic to Loew's views on labor.[6] Loew eventually advocated that some priests should work in labor, such as car factories, in order to better understand the everyday lives of their flocks.[1] In 1947, Karol Wojtyła – who later became Pope John Paul II – visited Loew in Marseilles and was impressed by the work, writing afterward: "Father Loew came to the conclusion that the [Dominican] white habit by itself does not say anything any more today [...] Living among workers he decided to become one of them."[1]
and later the one atWojtyła considered the work to be "apostolic" and the only correct way for the Church in France to reach non-believers.[1] As the worker-priest movement took on a greater role in left-wing politics – Loew had at one point briefly joined the General Confederation of Labour[2] – the Vatican became concerned that the role of priest was being subordinated to the role of worker.[1] In 1951, Loew sent a long defense of the movement to Giovanni Montini, then-assistant secretary of state for the Vatican who would later become Pope Paul VI.[1] Despite Loew's defense, the worker-priests in Marseilles were ordered to stop work in the summer of 1953[2] and Pope Pius XII formally condemned the movement in 1954.[1][3][6] Loew resigned his labor work and continued his priestly duties, though he continued to defend the idea of priests in labor, writing that "[o]f course a priest can belong to a trade union. This does not mean selling out your priesthood."[1]
Later, Loew continued his ministry, establishing the Mission ouvrière Saints-Pierre-et-PaulAix-en-Provence in 1955, serving as superior general until 1973.[4] After the mission's foundation, he went to Africa, later moving to São Paulo in 1963.[2][3] The intensity of the mission's work – which was managing operations in France, the Sahara, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, and Japan[2] – caused Loew to leave the Dominican Order in order to devote himself wholly to the mission's cause.[3][2] In 1965, Paul VI recognized the mission as an apostolic institute,[2] commenting that he wished "this new foundation, which flows from the love of Christ the worker, grows and makes the love of the Father shine".[3]
inIn 1969, he moved to Fribourg, Switzerland, where he and René Voillaume established the School of the Faith,[5] which served as an educational institution for educators.[1] Loew remained the director until his retirement in 1981.[4] In 1971, Paul VI invited Loew to preach the Lenten retreat at the Vatican.[1]
In his old age, Loew retired to monastic life, living in religious houses at the Cîteaux and Tamié abbeys beginning in 1981 and 1986, respectively,[2][5] followed by two and a half years living as a chaplain to the nuns at the hermitage at L'Albère in the Pyrenees.[2] In 1991, he settled in a community of Trappist nuns at the Notre-Dame de Bonne-Espérance Abbey in Échourgnac where he eventually died in 1999.[2][1][5]
In 2006, the School of the Faith was dissolved and converted into the Jacques Loew International Foundation which is a French-language biblical scholarship group operating in Curitiba, Brazil; Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire; Wrocław, Poland; and Fribourg.[4]