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Biography

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Pierre Goursat was a French Catholic layman, born in Paris in 1914, who became known as a co-founder of the Emmanuel Community. He came from a cultured Parisian milieu; his father, André Goursat, was connected with the art world as a critic and dealer. Goursat had a twin brother, Bernard. His youth was marked by fragile health, including tuberculosis, which left lasting effects and shaped a life of physical limitation as well as interior searching. He remained a layman, never entered a religious order, and never married, living a celibate life dedicated to prayer and the Church.

As an adult in Paris he moved in artistic and intellectual circles and developed a particular interest in cinema. He worked in Catholic cultural initiatives related to film and was associated with efforts to think about the arts in the light of faith. Over the middle decades of the twentieth century his Catholic practice deepened. He was formed by the liturgical, Eucharistic, and spiritual currents of the French Church of that era, and he combined a discreet personal poverty and simplicity of life with a strong sense of evangelization. He did not seek ordination; his vocation was that of a consecrated layperson in the world.

In the early 1970s, in the context of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as it reached France, Goursat and Martine Catta (Martine Laffitte-Catta) began a prayer group in Paris that grew into the Communauté de l’Emmanuel (Emmanuel Community), generally dated from 1972. The community gathered lay people, consecrated members, and priests around Eucharistic adoration, praise, compassion for the poor, and missionary outreach, with a marked Marian and ecclesial character. Goursat became the community’s first moderator and guided its early expansion in France and beyond. He resigned from that responsibility in the mid-1980s because of declining health.

Goursat died in Paris in 1991, on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. The Emmanuel Community continued to grow internationally after his death and received canonical recognition as an association of the faithful. A cause for his beatification was later opened in the Archdiocese of Paris, and he is invoked in that process as a Servant of God. He is remembered as a discreet, sickly, and determined lay founder rather than as a cleric or member of a traditional religious order, and as a figure of the post-conciliar charismatic and missionary renewal in French Catholicism.

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