R.I.P. Brother Roger of Taize

The 90+ year-old founder of the Protestant monastic movement in Taize (a town near Lyon, France) was assassinated about 12 hours ago, reportedly by a knife-weilding Romanian woman, who is being held for questioning.

Taize and Brother Roger are of enormous significance in the religious world -- they are the re-discovery of monasticism, the total dedication of life to the Lord -- by Protestantism. Bypassing all of the clever slogans and liberal revisionism, as well as the Fun_DUH_mentalist oddities of the last century, the Taize folk returned to the wellspings of Christian piety -- and generated beautiful music while they were about it -- which sounds to my untutored ear uncommonly like Gregorian Chant.

Interestingly, as of 12 hours after the assassination, no mention is being made of it on the major news outlets -- CNN, Fox News, or Reuters -- on-line editions. Alone of the majors, the BBC has an article on it. I think this says a great deal about what contemporary journalism thinks is "news".

All three have top-to-mid-page headlines about the sentencing of the BTK killer -- who richly deserves to be ignored, and nothing about one of the towering religious figures of the last century. Hunter S. Thompson would have approved. Pfeh!

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Let us then lift Brother Roger up onto our altars, and praise him as one of the heroes of our time for bringing a Christian ideal out of the dungeons of 500 years of Protestant rejection, and enlightening the lives of hundreds of thousands in the midst of a very dark century. Old Catholics have no formal bureacracy for examining and proclaiming saints, so we fall back on the ancient practice of the Church, still followed by Orthodoxy, of proclaiming and acclaiming worthy people.

Let us pray the Lord, that he take Brother Roger swiftly and gloriously into His Presence, and the presence of all the Saints in heaven.