The week of prayer for Christian unity will take place, as every year from January 18 to 25. All our friends from the area are invited to come to Taizé on Thursday January 18 at 6pm for a prayer service, followed by refreshments. The prayer will be broadcast live:

Before this, beginning at 5pm in room 15, there will be a meeting with Brother Matthew for those who wish.

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Welcome to all of you who have come from the region near Taizé this Christmas night when we are celebrating the nativity of Jesus. With my brothers, we are very glad to welcome you here in the Church of Reconciliation. At the end of the Eucharist, we are going to light our candles with the light that has come from Bethlehem and which is burning in this lantern. Then we will go outside and sing in front of the crib outside the church.

We have just heard the Gospel of the birth of Jesus. It’s a well-known story for many of us, but what does it have to say to us this evening? For me, it is a story that offers us some Christmas gifts. I can think of three gifts that we can receive by listening to it, gifts that God gives to each one of us. Perhaps you will recognise others as you reread the story.

The first gift is “joy”. There are the shepherds; they are not privileged people; they have to spend the night outside with their sheep. To these poor people, the angel, God’s messenger, announces “great joy”, not only for them but for all the people: good news to be shared. The shepherds will in their turn become messengers of God.

This “great joy” will also be the joy of Jesus’ friends at the end of the Gospel. It will fill their hearts after Christ’s death and resurrection. Joy can come to birth when we go through tight places. What is the joy I am receiving these days? How can I share it with others?

The second gift is called “peace”. At the sight of God’s messenger, the shepherds were seized with great fear. We can be taken aback when we realise that God is present. But the angel says: “Do not be afraid”. And then the whole sky sings of the peace that God offers to all the inhabitants of the earth, whom he loves without exception.

The peace that the shepherds receive in their hearts is to shine out around them. One of the early witnesses to Christ said: “Begin the work of peace within yourself so that, once you are at peace, you may bring peace to others”. Thinking about the violence in ourselves, in our societies and in our world, what is my responsibility for of this peace that God announces and entrusts to us?

The third gift I would call “newness”. The birth of Jesus is something completely new in the history of humanity. And the amazing thing for us, as for the shepherds, is that God chooses to meet us at the point where we are. God is no longer far away, but close to us. God is there, very weak, humble and poor in the baby Jesus, dependent on Mary, his mother, on Joseph and the others around him. And he entrusts himself to our care as well.
If something is new, it is often fragile. It needs to be welcomed, cared for and supported. And yet every new thing is part of a story. It is not by chance that Luke begins his account of the birth of Jesus by situating it among the current events of the time. What is new arises in our experience of life as it is lived, an experience in which we are invited to discern the traces of God.

What is the newness that God is asking us to welcome this Christmas night and during this Christmas season? Even if it is fragile, how can we create a space where we can nourish it and let it grow?

Let us welcome these three gifts from God: joy, peace and newness. Then we can then offer them to others too, by the way we live. Maybe this could be the challenge that Christmas presents to us all…

The Christmas Eucharist was broadcast from 8.30pm (Paris time) on the evening of Sunday 24 December.

The Taizé Community has a new prior. On Saturday 2 December, Brother Alois handed over his office to Brother Matthew in the presence of representatives of various Churches and many friends of the Community, as well as the young people in Taizé for the week.

Among the Church representatives, five were asked to say a prayer for Brother Matthew’s start as “servant of communion” in the Community: Bishop Benoît Rivière of Autun, Chalon and Mâcon, Metropolitan Maximos of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Geneva, Anglican Bishops Olivia Graham of Reading and Smitha Prasadam of Huddersfield, and Pastor Laurent Schlumberger, former President of the United Protestant Church of France. Others present included Pastor Christian Krieger, President of the French Protestant Federation, and the Lutheran Bishop of Riga, Rinalds Grants.

Photos of some key moments

Photos : Tamino Petelinsek

To obtain high resolution photos, please write to media taize.fr.

On Sunday 15 January in Rome, at the end of the Angelus prayer, Pope Francis announced that the work of the next assembly of the Synod of the Roman Catholic Church would be preceded by an ecumenical prayer vigil on Saturday 30 September on St Peter’s Square, Rome:

"The path to Christian unity and the path of synodal conversion of the Church are linked. I would like to take this opportunity to say that on Saturday 30 September, an ecumenical prayer vigil will be held on St. Peter’s Square, with which we will entrust to God the work of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops. For the young people coming to the vigil, there will be a special programme throughout that weekend, led by the Taizé community. As of now, I invite brothers and sisters of all Christian denominations to participate in this "Gathering of the People of God."

This gathering of the people of God was prepared by representatives of around fifty church groupings from many different denominations.

 See the event website www.together2023.net for more information.

During the Sunday Eucharist, the Archbishop of Uppsala, Martin Modéus, gave a meditation on the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. His closing words were "Jesus invites us to see the world, together with him, with the eyes of life and love. On our pilgrimage we are maybe not there. But he is there, looking at us with eyes shimmering with love." (full text online here)

The relationship between Taizé and the Church of Sweden goes back many years, but it was after a youth meeting in Linköping in 1990, on the invitation of Bishop Martin Lönnebo, who passed away on April 27, 2023 whilst the bishops were in Taizé, that the number of young people visiting from Sweden grew. Large numbers of youth leaders come together with their parishes to take part on the meetings in Taizé during Easter, summer and the All Saints holidays.

The next step in the preparation of this unprecedented ecumenical event, which already involves some sixty partners from various denominational backgrounds, will take place from 12 to 15 March in Rome. In announcing the event on 15 January, Pope Francis invited "brothers and sisters of all Christian denominations to participate in this ’gathering of the people of God’" (full text hereî).

Before coming to Rome, Brother Alois visited the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, the Reverend Jerry Pillay, and the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, the Reverend Anne Burghardt, in Geneva on Monday 6 March. He was accompanied by the sixty or so young people currently volunteering in Taizé.

This Friday evening, 12 March, Brother Alois will speak in Frankfurt at the fifth and final assembly of the Synodal Way in Germany, for a meditation which will give him the opportunity to underline the spiritual dimension of the synodal process.

Press information

For more information on the "Together" gathering write to this address.
For more information on the Taizé Community write to this address.

Photo (C) Vatican Media

Eternal God, praise be to you! You call us to follow Jesus Christ. And you want us, through our life as brothers, to be a parable of that communion which Christ brought for all humanity.

We confide to you all the things we have talked about over the last few days – the kindness so essential for our common life, the co-responsibility and cooperation between us, our will to widen our friendships so as to contribute to the search for a new face of the Church. We pray that you will give us hearts that are open for these conversations to bear fruit.

We thank you for our brothers in the fraternities whose lives make the Gospel present in very diverse situations. Show us how our fraternities can evolve in a changing world and in accordance with the changes that our community is experiencing.

Teach us to listen better to the whisper of your Holy Spirit, in us and in our common life. Increase our faith in the presence and in the strength of your Spirit which always revives our vocation. Your Spirit is the spring that never dries up. Help us to draw from this spring the courageous decisions that will allow the heritage of our community to be always renewed, in our desire to achieve a common creation supported by all the brothers.

Your Holy Spirit leads us to listen more to one another. You have given us the opportunity to experience this during these days of our Council. In listening to one another you give us new insights and the courage to put them into practice.

We entrust to you all that is going to be part of our live this year in community, in the confidence that you will guide us in the future as you have done until now. Keep us in joy and in a spirit of generosity.

We entrust to you the whole Church, the project "Together – the Gathering of the People of God", the journeys of the brothers to reach out to young people on different continents, the meetings in Taizé, Ljubljana and elsewhere, as well as the pastoral initiatives that our brothers will be undertaking in the fraternities.

And we ardently entrust to you all those who bear serious wounds, the victims of war, in Ukraine and elsewhere, the victims of sexual aggression and spiritual abuse, migrants, those who suffer from climate change, the sick and all those forgotten in our societies.
God of love, in Christ you give us a living hope. Grant that we may be faithful witnesses to this.

To watch the evening prayer on video:

The death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI touches our hearts in Taizé because our community has had a relationship with him for over half a century. In fact, Joseph Ratzinger and Brother Roger already knew each other at the Second Vatican Council, where one was an expert and the other an observer.

 

I remember myself staying with Brother Roger at the home of the theologian who became Archbishop of Munich during a meeting of young people that we had prepared in that city. He received us warmly in his house.

 

Later, when Brother Roger went to Rome every year to meet Pope John Paul II, he often went to visit Cardinal Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in order to have an in-depth exchange with him.

 

The last letter written by Brother Roger three days before he was murdered was addressed to the new Pope Benedict XVI to tell him that his advanced age did not allow him to go to the WYD in Cologne, but that he would go as soon as possible to greet him in Rome. The Pope had this letter in his hands during the general audience on Wednesday when he announced with sadness the tragic death of the founder of our community. He held Brother Roger in great esteem, and five years after his death he wrote: "May his witness to an ecumenism of holiness inspire us in our march towards unity.”

 

Personally, I am very grateful for the welcome that Benedict XVI gave me when I went to meet him a few months after the beginning of my new ministry as prior of our community. The same year, 2005, saw the death of John Paul II and of Brother Roger. How would our community’s relationship with the Pope continue? From the very first audience I understood that his confidence in us had been won and that I could go to see him every year. He told me: "In Taizé, you have the songs and the silence, you go to the essential with the young people, towards a personal relationship with God.” This was very important for him and for us.

 

The relationship with him culminated in the prayer we celebrated in his presence on December 29, 2012, during our young adult European meeting in Rome. To the thousands of young people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, Benedict XVI said, among other things, "I assure you of the Catholic Church’s irrevocable commitment to continue to search for ways of reconciliation in order to achieve the visible unity of Christians."

 

A few weeks later he resigned, and I made a point of going to see him in his retirement the following year to thank him for the unfailing support he had always given to our community in its vocation.

Photo: (C) Servizio Fotografico dell’Osservatore Romano | Vatican Media

Taizé • Press release | Friday 19 August 2022

The international meetings have resumed their course in Taizé after two years marked by the pandemic. Since Easter, more than 20,000 young people have come to take part week after week in the activities offered: community prayer, sharing in small groups, workshops for reflection, practical tasks.

The end of the summer will be marked by an exceptional visit: Mrs Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, will be in Taizé on Saturday 27 August. During her visit, she will meet with the community and dialogue with young people present in Taizé that week. She will give a public lecture on European affairs at 5:30 pm. It will be possible to attend this conference by registering in advance. (Update: This possibility is now closed. You can of course follow the conference online.)

During this special week for young adults from 18 to 35 years old, other speakers will lead workshops, among them experts in various fields, scientists, political leaders—the full program will be published on the website. A special program on saving biodiversity will be offered for those who wish to attend.

Brother Alois reacts: “Our desire as a community is that all the young people who come to Taizé may feel that trust in God helps them to find meaning in their lives and to assume responsibilities when they return home. Ursula von der Leyen’s visit is an important moment, which indicates that the aspirations and commitments of the younger generation are being heard and taken into account by political leaders and institutions. In this respect, this visit, in the serious crises of the present time, will be a sign of hope.”

Some news in brief :

• • This Saturday, August 20, as part of the "week of witness to the Orthodox faith", a special day will take place in Taizé: Metropolitan Dimitrios will come from Paris to celebrate the divine liturgy at 9 am, in the Church of Reconciliation.

• • The next European meeting will take place from December 28 to January 1, 2023 in Rostock, in the north of Germany, on the shores of the Baltic Sea..

• • The evening prayer continues to be broadcast live each day in audio on the Taizé website, and the Saturday evening prayer in live video.

Media Accreditation

To follow Ursula von der Leyen’s conference as a journalist or photographer, it is necessary to request an accreditation via this online form .

To obtain photos of the summer in Taizé, or to request an interview with brothers or volunteers, write to us at media taize.fr.

From July 10 to 12, on the invitation of the Taizé Community, a meeting brought together representatives of several national youth ministry services and Catholic movements involved in ecumenism, as well as Protestant and Anglican Christians. The discussions focused on the question: how can the synodal pathway which is taking place in the Catholic Church become a powerful moment in the search for unity among Christians and the whole human family, and how can we encourage the involvement of young people in this process?

Among the participants who spoke were Sister Nathalie Becquart, xmcj, from the Synod Secretariat; Father Hyacinthe Destivelle, op, from the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity; Father João Chagas, from the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life; Brother Alois, prior of Taizé. These days enabled us to walk together in great diversity and in hope for unity.