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Jacques Loew (31 August 190814 February 1999) was a French Dominican Order friar and priest, who founded both the andwith René Voillaumethe School of the Faith in Fribourg, Switzerland. He is best known for starting the Worker-priest.
In 1934, Loew joined the Dominican Order, becoming a friar in 1935 before being ordained a priest in 1939. Soon after, he began working alongside Louis-Joseph Lebret with the Economie et Humanisme group in Lyon, as one of its founders. Lebret instructed him to learn about the working class and study its condition in order to better be able to minister to it, particularly to the French secularized working class. In 1941, he began to work in Marseille as a longshoreman, which gave him a lasting impression about the distance between working people and the priesthood. Between 1942 and 1944, Loew and about ten priests established the Popular Family Movement (Mouvement populaire des familles; MPF) and four of them requested the Bishop of Marseille, , authorize them to begin evangelizing "in the framework of a missionary parish". In November 1945, Delay entrusted the parish of , a working-class neighborhood in northern Marseille, to two diocesansJean Gentile and Georges Hallauerand two Dominican religiousLoew and André Piet. The presence of factories and Communism as well as its proximity to the docks and the absence of any strong religious communities made it appeal to the worker-priest missionaries.
In 1947, Loew was entrusted with the parish at and later the one at Port-de-Bouc, which contained several Secular clergy who were sympathetic to Loew's views on labor. Loew eventually advocated that some priests should work in labor, such as car factories, in order to better understand the everyday lives of their flocks. In 1947, Karol Wojtyławho later became Pope John Paul IIvisited Loew in Marseille and was impressed by the work, writing afterward: "Father Loew came to the conclusion that the Dominican white Religious habit by itself does not say anything any more today ... Living among workers he decided to become one of them."
Wojtyła considered the work to be "apostolic" and the only correct way for the Church in France to reach non-believers. As the worker-priest movement took on a greater role in left-wing politicsLoew had at one point briefly joined the General Confederation of Labourthe Vatican became concerned that the role of priest was being subordinated to the role of worker. In 1951, Loew sent a long defense of the movement to Giovanni Montini, then-assistant secretary of state for the Vatican who would later become Pope Paul VI. Despite Loew's defense, the worker-priests in Marseille were ordered to stop work in the summer of 1953 and Pope Pius XII formally condemned the movement in 1954. Loew resigned his labor work and continued his priestly duties, though he continued to defend the idea of priests in labor, writing that "of course a priest can belong to a trade union. This does not mean selling out your priesthood."
Later, Loew continued his ministry, establishing the in Aix-en-Provence in 1955, serving as superior general until 1973. After the mission's foundation, he went to Africa, later moving to São Paulo in 1963. The intensity of the mission's workwhich was managing operations in France, the Sahara, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, and Japancaused Loew to leave the Dominican Order in order to devote himself wholly to the mission's cause. In 1965, Paul VI recognized the mission as an apostolic institute, commenting that he wished "this new foundation, which flows from the love of Christ the worker, grows and makes the love of the Father shine".
In 1969, he moved to Fribourg, Switzerland, where he and René Voillaume established the School of the Faith, which served as an educational institution for educators. Loew remained the director until his retirement in 1981. In 1971, Paul VI invited Loew to preach the retreat at the Vatican.
In his old age, Loew retired to monastic life, living in religious houses at the Cîteaux and Tamié abbeys beginning in 1981 and 1986, respectively, followed by two and a half years living as a chaplain to the nuns at the hermitage at L'Albère in the Pyrenees. In 1991, he settled in a community of Trappist nuns at the in Échourgnac where he eventually died in 1999.
In 2006, the School of the Faith was dissolved and converted into the Jacques Loew International Foundation which is a French-language biblical scholarship group operating in Curitiba, Brazil; Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire; Wrocław, Poland; and Fribourg.
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