Abbé Pierre, 94, French Priest Who Aided the Homeless, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
The New York Times

Abbé Pierre, who in the 1950s as a gaunt priest with a crook-handled cane and a profoundly persuasive passion mobilized France to attend to its homeless, then kept pressing his crusade until he became known as the country’s moral compass, died yesterday in Paris. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a respiratory infection, said Martin Hirsch, president of the organization Abbé Pierre founded, Emmaus.

“Friends! Help!” Abbé Pierre cried out during lunchtime news in the Paris studios of Radio Luxembourg on Feb. 1, 1954. It was a cruelly cold winter and the priest said a woman had been found frozen to death on the pavement of the Boulevard de Sebastopol clutching her eviction papers. He also told of a frozen baby.

Within minutes, volunteers began to appear at a relief center, and soon 200 people came with automobiles to search for more victims. Thousands of blankets, tons of clothes and millions of francs were donated. The government, which had previously turned down Abbé Pierre’s pleas for emergency housing, quickly promised 12,000 dwellings.

Housing was then France’s most urgent need: more than 2,000 people slept each night on the Paris streets and one in five French people lived in what a government report called “inadmissible” living conditions. Because of this need and the force of his own personality, Abbé Pierre moved his countrymen.

He expanded his “uprising of goodness” to more than 50 countries on four continents, and to issues from water quality to contemporary slavery, through what became Emmaus International. The Bible says that it was on the road to Emmaus that the risen Jesus met his disciples.

In the process, Abbé Pierre attained immense celebrity in France, being voted the most popular French person for 17 years before withdrawing his name. The scruffily bearded face of a man who lived in a humble room with a bed and table adorned billboards and magazine covers.

Television viewers in 2005 voted him the third greatest French person of all time, after de Gaulle and Pasteur.

Abbé Pierre’s remarkable life included being born rich, then giving everything away when he became a monk. He served on two fronts in World War II, and after France’s defeat was a much-decorated hero in the Resistance. He was a legislator in the National Assembly.

He wrote that as a young priest, he had sex with a woman, and further infuriated Roman Catholic authorities by advocating gay marriage. He gave back his Legion of Honor commendation to draw attention to the plight of homeless people, only to have President Jacques Chirac give him another.

The Washington Post in 1996 quoted an unidentified church official as saying that Abbé Pierre “was always a bit excessive in the tradition of the great prophets.” He often claimed to be motivated by “holy anger.”

Abbé Pierre also inspired anger, most famously in 1996 when he defended an author who questioned the fact of the Holocaust. The author, Roger Garaudy, was his friend.

After a public outcry, the priest apologized, withdrew his support and insisted he had never questioned the Holocaust. He said that he had not even read the book, “The Founding Myths of Israeli Policy.”

Henri Antoine Grouès was born on Aug. 5, 1912, in Lyon, France, where his father was a wealthy silk merchant who devoted his Sundays to helping the poor. Henri often accompanied him on charitable missions.

A visit to Italy during his boyhood influenced his career choice. “All night long I roamed Assisi, ‘The Life of St. Francis’ under my arm,” he said in the 1955 edition of Current Biography. “When morning came, I knew I wanted to be a priest.”

He studied at the Collège des Jésuites in Lyon. At 18, he entered a Capuchin monastery, but left eight years later after contracting tuberculosis. He was ordained at the St. Joseph Basilica in Grenoble.

During World War II, he served on the Alsatian and Alpine fronts and after the defeat of France became vicar of the cathedral in Grenoble. In 1942, he joined the Resistance, fighting Italian occupiers. He assumed the name Abbé Pierre — Abbé, meaning abbot, is a traditional title for French priests — and helped Jews and others, including de Gaulle’s brother, escape over the Alps and Pyrenees.

He was captured and escaped at least twice, and started an underground newspaper and magazine. He next served as a chaplain for the French Navy. After the war, he served in the legislative body that drafted France’s new Constitution, then in the resultant National Assembly.

Simultaneously, he began setting up places for homeless people to live, including empty huts in prisoner of war camps. He helped finance his efforts by organizing the homeless to collect and recycle junk, earning him the nickname “the ragpicker’s saint.”

Abbé Pierre was often compared with Sister Emanuelle, known as “the saint of Cairo’s garbage dump” for her similar efforts at helping the poor recycle. The Religious News Service in 2005 reported that the two talked regularly, although it said the priest was known to complain that she talked too much.