Short Songs and a Great Many Young People

Taize is known far beyond monastic circles for two things. The first is its music: short phrases, usually a single line of text in Latin or another language, harmonised simply and repeated for as long as the prayer lasts. The form was developed for a congregation that changes every week, that has no shared language and that cannot rehearse, and it solved that problem so effectively that the chants are now sung in churches of almost every tradition worldwide. The second is the number of young people who come. From the 1960s the community began receiving visitors in large numbers for weeks of common prayer, silence, simple work and small group discussion, and it also organises an annual European meeting hosted in a different city each new year. Neither of those was a plan the community set out with; both grew out of people arriving.

Brother Roger was killed during evening prayer in August 2005 by a woman who was mentally ill, and the community continued under the prior he had already designated, which the brothers have described as the arrangement he made precisely so that the community would not depend on him. Taize is a living community and the atlas describes it rather than commending it.