Scandal topples the reputation of the founder of L’Arche

SINCE SAINTS are so rare in the modern world, they are elaborately treasured. When Jean Vanier died in May 2019 he drew praise and admiration from all sides, including Pope Francis, prominent American clergy—and The Economist. He had founded a network of small house-based communities, known as L’Arche (The Ark), in which people with disabilities and those without ate, lived, worked and prayed together. There are now 154 such communities around the world. Their humane approach to care has been widely copied.

Yet as much as Vanier’s concept, his personality inspired people. Here was a Canadian academic, with no training, who built up L’Arche after 1964 from one derelict house at Trosly-Breuil, in northern France, because he felt Jesus asked it of him. In his habits of asceticism, joyfulness and prayer he seemed a model of holiness for lay men and women. He wrote of how the simple goodness of his charges inspired him, too, to be a better man. But all this hid another life, which has now been exposed in a report by L’Arche International itself.