Priests at work.

Father Jacques Loew's life, which ended at the age of 90 in late February, began in a nonbelieving family in southern France, took him first into the priesthood and then into the heart of the working world as one of the original worker-priests, across the world through a long career in the labor mission, and finally into the contemplative life.

At the age of 24, Loew converted to Catholicism and was ordained a Dominican priest in 1939. Sent to study the conditions of the working class in Marseilles, he took a job as a dock worker--the poorest-paying manual labor available--a job at which he worked for 12 years.

Spurred by a book by Henri Godin and Yves David, two Catholic Action chaplains, a movement began to grow around Loew and others in the 1940s for priests who would identify completely with workers and manually labor for a living. Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard of Paris took up and defended their cause, and eventually the church was officially assigning priests to enter the workforce full-time.

As worker-priests lived and labored in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris, Lyons, and other French and Belgian cities, they became active in both the peace and labor movements. Shunning the reform-minded Catholic labor federations, some joined communist-led unions. These affiliations led conservative Catholics to pressure the hierarchy to act against the priests, and in 1954 Pope Pius XII ordered the French cardinals to compel them to cease laboring and turn in their union cards. Loew was among the 40 priests, half the contingent, to comply, although he continued to assert, "Of course a priest can belong to a trade union. This does not mean selling out your priesthood." In a reversal of the church's position, the Second Vatican Council later restored the worker-priest movement.

A year after the suppression of the worker-priests, the Dominicans released Loew to found the Saints Peter and Paul Labor Mission. This work, which began in France, took him to Africa and the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He returned to Europe in 1969 and established the Fribourg, Switzerland Ecole de la foi ("School of Faith"), and two years later he preached the Vatican Lenten retreat in the presence of Pope Paul VI. His many popular books earned him the Grand Prix Catholique de Litterature in 1989.

Loew spent the last years of his life in the Abbey of Tamie, as a hermit in the Pyrenees, and finally in residence at the Trappistine abbey of Ecourgnac, where he died and was buried.