Abbé Pierre

Lyon, Rhône, France

Abbé Pierre, OFM Cap, GOQ (born Henri Marie Joseph Grouès; 5 August 1912 – 22 January 2007) was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP).

In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees. He was one of the most popular figures in France but had his name removed from such polls after some time.

Grouès was born on 5 August 1912 in Lyon, France to a wealthy Catholic family of silk traders, the fifth of eight children. His aunt was the writer Héra Mirtel. He spent his childhood in Irigny, near Lyon. He was twelve when he met François Chabbey and went for the first time with his father to an Order circle, the brotherhood of the "Hospitaliers veilleurs" in which the mainly middle-class members would serve the poor by providing barber services.

Grouès became a member of the Scouts de France in which he was nicknamed "Meditative Beaver" (Castor méditatif). In 1928, aged 16, he made the decision to join a monastic order, but he had to wait until he was seventeen and a half to fulfill this ambition. In 1931 Grouès entered the Capuchin Order, the principal offshoot of the Franciscans, renouncing his inheritances and offering all his possessions to charities.

Known as frère Philippe (Brother Philippe), he entered the monastery of Crest in 1932, where he lived for seven years. He had to leave in 1939 after developing severe lung infections, which made the strict and hard monastic life difficult to cope with. He became chaplain to the hospital of La Mure (Isère), and then of an orphanage in the Côte-Saint-André (also in the Isère department). After being ordained a Roman Catholic priest on 24 August 1938, he became curate of Grenoble's cathedral in April 1939, only a few months before the invasion of Poland.

The Jesuit Fr. Henri de Lubac told him on the day of his priestly ordination: "ask the Holy Spirit to grant you the same anti-clericalism of the saints."

When World War II broke out in 1939, he was mobilised as a non-commissioned officer in the train transport corps. According to his official biography, he helped Jewish people to escape Nazi persecution following the July 1942 mass arrests in Paris, called the Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv, and another raid in the area of Grenoble in the non-occupied zone: "In July 1942, two fleeing Jews asked him for help. Having discovered the persecution taking place, he immediately went to learn how to make false passports. Starting in August 1942, he guided Jewish people to Switzerland".

His pseudonym dates from his work with the French Resistance during the Second World War, when he operated under several different names. Based in Grenoble, an important center of the Resistance, he helped Jews and politically persecuted escape to Switzerland. In 1942, he assisted Jacques de Gaulle (the brother of Charles de Gaulle) and his wife escape to Switzerland. ...

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