Jacques Loew was born in 1908 in
Clermont-Ferrand, the only child of August Pierre Loew, a
medical doctor, and Jeanne Maximilienne (). The family comprised middle-class socialists and
Dreyfusards with
anti-clerical sentiments. Loew grew up in
Nice and, although he was
baptized Catholic, he attended Protestant
Sunday school. He later studied law and
political science in Paris, before finishing his schooling at the Sanatorium Universitaire in
Leysin, Switzerland, due to a case of
tuberculosis. When his schooling was complete, he registered with the
bar in Nice, but his nascent law career was disrupted by another bout of tuberculosis. Returning to the sanatorium in Leysin for medical treatment, he converted to
Catholicism at 24 after reading the
Gospel. Prior to his official reception into the Catholic Church, he traveled to
La Valsainte, a
Carthusian monastery in
Gruyère, Switzerland, where he was particularly impressed by the
dom, , who further solidified his conversion and encouraged him to meet and his wife, Ainouta, who encouraged him further. He was fully received into the Catholic Church in October 1932, with the Fumets serving as his
sponsors. in Leysin in 1927, about five years before Loew converted to Catholicism there 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 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 (; 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
communists 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 priests 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
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 "[o]f 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
Lenten 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. ==Works==