Word: gmeiner
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...other living saints, giving means devoting their lives entirely to the needs of orphans. Austrian Catholic Hermann Gmeiner, 56, saw that need in the wake of World War II, when Europe was crowded with homeless refugee children. He took a leaf from his childhood-an older sister had raised the eight other children after his mother died-and built the first in a series of "S O S villages" that now care for 15,000 orphans round the world. Every village consists of a cluster of houses, each presided over by a foster mother who cares for eight...
...What Gmeiner has done for orphans, Canadian Jean Vanier has accomplished in a similar way for mentally retarded adults: permanent and caring communities. A Catholic layman and son of a former Governor General of Canada, Vanier spent 14 years of spiritual search before moving into a dilapidated old house in Trosly, France, in 1964 to share his life with two retarded men. Since then, L 'Arche (the Ark) communities, in which the normal and retarded share a common life, have opened on four continents. Vanier describes the homes as places of "human and spiritual progress," where the retarded gain...
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