Abbé Pierre

Abbé Pierre, OFM Cap, GOQ (born Henri Marie Joseph Grouès; 5 August 1912 – 22 January 2007) was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP).

In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees. Abbé means abbot in French, and is also used as a courtesy title given to Catholic priests in French-speaking countries. He was one of the most popular figures in France, but had his name removed from such polls after some time.

Youth and education

Grouès was born on 5 August 1912 in Lyon, France to a wealthy Catholic family of silk traders, the fifth of eight children. He spent his childhood in Irigny, near Lyon. He was twelve when he met François Chabbey and went for the first time with his father to an Order circle, the brotherhood of the "Hospitaliers veilleurs" in which the mainly middle-class members would serve the poor by providing barber services.

Grouès became a member of the Scouts de France in which he was nicknamed "Meditative Beaver" (Castor méditatif). In 1928, aged 16, he made the decision to join a monastic order, but he had to wait until he was seventeen and a half to fulfill this ambition. In 1931 Grouès entered the Capuchin Order, the principal offshoot of the Franciscans, renouncing his inheritances and offering all his possessions to charities.