Jean Vanier honoured for exemplary life of service
CMU awarded L'Arche founder Jean Vanier the PAX award for a life-time of support for people with developmental disabilities
Jean Vanier, life-time supporter of people with developmental disabilities, was recently honoured for his exemplary life of leadership and reconciliation.
Canadian Mennonite University is presenting Vanier with their inaugural PAX Award earlier this month, an honour given to people who’ve lead exemplary lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.
“Jean Vanier turned a minimalist sense of caregiving and turned it into a movement that recognizes and appreciates the gifts of people with developmental disabilities,” CMU president Cheryl Pauls says in a release.
Vanier is the founder of L’Arche, an international federation of communities for people with developmental disabilities and those that assist them.
Vanier had become distressed by the institutionalization, isolation, and loneliness of people with intellectual disabilities, and envisioned a place where they could live alongside those who come to assist them, and share life and daytime activities together in family-like settings.
“Essentially, they wanted a friend,” Vanier says in a release. “They were not very interested in my knowledge or my ability to do things, but rather they needed my heart and my being.”
Born Canadian in Geneva, Switzerland, Vanier’s father had a diplomatic career that took the family to France and England, where Vanier spent his childhood. After serving in the British and Canadian navies, Vanier earned a PhD in philosophy.
He left academia in the 1960s and established the first L’Arche community in France after befriending two men with intellectual disabilities and inviting them to live with him in a small house he purchased.
Vanier called the house “L’Arche,” a French word for “the ark” in the biblical story of Noah and the flood. Within a couple of years, other homes were born. Today, L’Arche has more than 5,000 members in 147 communities on five continents.
Earlier this year, Vanier was awarded the 2015 Templeton Prize. Valued at $1.7 million USD, the Prize honours a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.
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