Tributes have been paid to Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movement, who died on May 7, aged 90.
Vanier founded the first L’Arche community with two disabled people at Trosly-Breuil, near Paris in 1964, after being disturbed by the conditions people were looked after in at a nearby institution.
His vision was that disabled and nondisabled people should live and grow together in friendship, instead of the usual model of the strong doing things for the weak. He wrote, in one of his 40 books: “The whole vision of Jesus is the gradual discovery that the poor are not people whom we have to change from our pedestal and make them like us, but people from whom we can drink.”