Jean Vanier was born on September 10, 1928, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his father, General Georges Vanier, was on a diplomatic mission. Most of his early schooling was in England where he lived until World War II when his parents send him and his four brothers and one sister back to Canada.
Two years later, the young Jean decided to enter the Royal Naval College in England. Too young to become a soldier, he assisted his mother in her Red Cross work in Paris after the liberation, helping with those returning from the concentration camps. In 1945, Jean received his officer’s commission and began his naval career.
Despite the promising career that lay in front of him, he was more and more drawn into prayer and reflection on what might be God’s call for him. In 1950, he resigned from the Navy to study philosophy and theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris. It was there where he met Father Thomas Philippe, a Dominican priest and professor who was to become Jean’s spiritual mentor and friend.
In 1963, having published his doctoral thesis on Aristotle, he returned to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. Again, he decided against the security of a career and left job and homeland to join Father Thomas Philippe who had become chaplain to a small institution for men with learning disabilities, the Val Fleury, in Trosly-Breuil. In 1964 Jean decided to settle in Trosly to live with people with an intellectual disability. He bought a small house and named it “L’Arche”, the French word for Noah’s Ark.
Though heavily involved in the rapidly growing community, Jean began to give conferences and retreats around the world. In 1969, following a retreat he gave in Ontario, the first community of L’Arche in North America was founded. The next year, again after a visit by Jean, the first L’Arche community in India was founded. In 1968 he also co-founded Faith and Sharing. In these communities, families who have a member with a disability and their friends meet once a month for prayer and mutual support and celebration. Three years later, the organisation of a pilgrimage of 12,000 people with learning disabilities, their friends and families to Lourdes led to the co-founding of Faith and Light. This sister pilgrimage movement unites people with an intellectual disability and their family members and friends for regular gatherings and periodic pilgrimages of friendship, prayer and celebration. In the early 1990s, he founded Intercordia, which provides university students with an accredited cross-cultural experience in social education and personal growth among poor or marginalized peoples in the developing world.
For nearly four decades, Jean has travelled the world fashioning a network of homes where people with learning disabilities, volunteers and a sprinkling of staff live together in community. Those we lock away and think worthless, he says, have the power to teach and even to heal us. We are all “broken” in some way, he believes. (…) “When you start living with people with disabilities”, he says, “you begin to discover a whole lot of things about yourself.” He learned that to “be human is to be bonded together, each with our own weaknesses and strengths, because we need each other.” (…) Tall and stooped, Vanier radiates the strength of a man who has fought his own inner battles and surfaced with peace. (Maclean’s/September 4, 2000, p.33)
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