Word: abbe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Abbé Pierre's communes, old junk leads to new lives
...priest is the Rev. Henri de Grouès, 65, known universally as Abbé Pierre. The only visible indication that he is no ordinary priest is a thin red ribbon of the Legion of Honor stitched on his jacket. But he is the man who, as a former law professor at the Orléans lunch put it, "almost singlehanded mobilized the entire government and people of France to do something for the poor...
...took the vows of the Capuchin order. In 1938, when his health broke after eight years in the monastery at Crest, he moved to a parish in Grenoble. Eventually, he became a leader of the anti-Nazi Resistance in eastern France, using many aliases including the one that stuck: Abbé Pierre. Among other exploits, he carried Charles de Gaulle's ailing brother Jacques across the frontier to safety in Switzerland. Later he himself was smuggled into Algeria in a mail sack, carrying a plea for arms intended for Churchill...
After the war, Abbé Pierre was elected a deputy in the National Assembly. He began renovating a large, ramshackle house in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance as a hostel for needy people. Soon ex-cons, destitute families and vagrants joined him, and the abbe and his growing family of followers started building new residences nearby, using salvaged materials. He called his commune Emmaus, after the New Testament town (Luke 24:13-32) where two disciples, despondent after the Crucifixion, met the risen Christ and were filled with new hope. As it happened, the Emmaus movement was to grow...
Banned from the Pulpit. No less colorful than his accuser, the Abbé de Nantes was banned from the pulpit in the diocese of Troyes in 1966 for his inflammatory opinions, one of which is that Pope Paul VI is a heretic. Placing a crucifix at the base of the courtroom microphone, the abbe told the court that Isorni had falsified the New Testament. ("Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him," according to John 5:18, because he had not only broken the sabbath, but said that God was his father.) Absolution of the Jewish people would amount...