Taizé

The Taizé Community was founded in 1940 by Brother Roger Schütz, a Reformed Protestant, in the village of Taizé in Saône-et-Loire. It is now about a hundred brothers from Catholic and Protestant traditions, drawn from some thirty countries, living under a rule Brother Roger first published in 1954.

The music is what carried Taizé beyond its own hillside. The chants are short, repeated many times over, often a single line from the Psalms sung in Latin or in one of many languages at once. They are not written to be listened to. Repetition is the point: it lets a phrase settle until it no longer needs attention, and leaves room for the silence the prayer is built around.

More than a hundred thousand young people come each year, and the community's prayers three times a day are open to whoever is there. The meetings run in weekly cycles through most of the year, the brothers travel to lead prayer elsewhere, and the evening prayer is streamed.