Henri Caffarel

Henri Caffarel was born in Lyon, France, in 1903. As a young man of about twenty he underwent a decisive conversion that oriented his life toward God and the priesthood. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Paris in 1930. From early in his ministry he took a particular interest in the spiritual lives of lay people, especially married couples, at a period when Catholic pastoral practice still gave comparatively little systematic attention to marriage as a vocation to holiness. He remained a diocesan priest of Paris throughout his life and was never a member of a religious order, nor was he raised to the episcopate.

In the late 1930s he began to meet regularly with a small number of couples in Paris. Those gatherings grew into the Equipes Notre-Dame (Teams of Our Lady), a movement in which married couples commit themselves to a shared rule of life, monthly team meetings, personal prayer, and a regular conjugal dialogue. After the Second World War the Teams adopted a charter and spread throughout France and then to many other countries, becoming one of the most significant Catholic movements devoted to the spirituality of the sacrament of marriage. Caffarel also founded the review L’Anneau d’Or, which for many years published reflections on married and family life, and he accompanied widows in a fraternity dedicated to Notre-Dame de la Résurrection.

Alongside his work with couples he promoted contemplative prayer among the laity. In the 1960s he established a House of Prayer at Troussures, in the Oise department north of Paris, which served as a place of retreat and formation in silence and interior prayer. He wrote numerous books and articles on prayer, the spiritual life, and the couple’s path to God. In the 1970s he withdrew from the day-to-day direction of the Teams in order to live a more hidden life of prayer at Troussures, while remaining a sought-after spiritual guide.

Caffarel died at Troussures in 1996. The Archdiocese of Paris opened a cause for his beatification in the early twenty-first century; he has not been beatified or canonized. He is remembered as a major figure in twentieth-century French Catholicism for his insistence that marriage is a genuine way of holiness and that ordinary lay people are called to a serious life of prayer.