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Jean Vanier, right, with Mark Drangstveit . Credit: Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times via Getty
A short while ago, news websites were full of pictures of the Met Gala in New York. Celebrities paraded around wearing all kinds of outlandish outfits. It was an exhibition of showy, A-list glitz at its loudest: illustrious people, many famous for not much more than being famous, tailgated by swarms of photographers there to record the occasion. It was the epitome of our celebrity ‘look at me’ culture.
A day later in Paris, Jean Vanier died. He was no celebrity and held no high public office, yet the tributes paid since his death give a flavour of how highly he was regarded. A “spiritual giant” and a “living saint” were some of the more restrained epithets.
Vanier was the son of a Canadian diplomat raised in Canada, France and the UK, who had served in the British and Canadian Navy. Uneasy with the bravado and competitive atmosphere of the military, he moved into academia, teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto. In the early 1960s, he started visiting a home for people with mental illness near Paris. Shocked by the conditions in which they lived, he began forming a revolutionary idea shaped by his Christian faith.
Vanier bought a run-down house in the village of Trosly-Breuil north of Paris, where he invited two men with learning difficulties, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, to build with him a small community. Others soon joined, and by the time Vanier died on 7 May this year, the community had grown into a movement known today as l’Arche (the Ark), comprising more than 140 different communities in 35 countries around the world, 10 of them in the UK.
The concept behind l’Arche is simple. Rather than placing people with additional needs into what used to be called mental institutions, or even ‘independent living’, it brought different people together to live in the same communal space. The able-bodied lived alongside the disabled, those with learning difficulties alongside those without.
l’Arche was not a charitable movement based on the strong helping the weak. At its heart lay the conviction that mental or physical abilities bear no relation to the value and beauty of an individual human being. Those with learning difficulties, rather than recipients of help, come ready with much to teach those of us without learning difficulties.
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SubscribeI agree with this philosophy that each human being is valuable and contributes. However I do not know how you can write an entire piece on this man without acknowledging that he has been accused of sexually abusing women. How can we now be expected to accept the hero worship directed at him?