A Protestant monk, Brother Roger Schutz, was buried this week in France after a funeral Mass celebrated by a Roman Catholic cardinal, Walter Kasper. The church of the monks in the village of Taizé could not hold the thousands trying to attend the funeral of the 90-year-old man murdered before a full church at the recent evening prayer.

Typically, thousands come with devotion to this out-of-the-way place, though it takes train rides, a bus ride and a long walk up a hill. Most of the time it was to pray with Brother Roger. Now it was time to pray for him.

He was a holy man, a spiritual genius, offering a welcoming, maternal image of the church. Despite this, he was dismissed over and over again as some kind of dreamer. Yet 80,000 young people gathered annually for a special convocation around him in some city, maybe in Europe or in Asia. Critics said they came to deal in drugs.

Others who liked Roger also misread him. They thought he had to be really liberally loose with or ignorant of Christian teaching. He was not, as some national papers have put it, soft on doctrine. A theologian, he knew theology can be used to build walls and compartments. He also knew that theology could be used to open doors. A murderer came through that open door and killed him in front of a few thousand young guests. But neither Roger nor the other brothers will shut that door. The same open space that allows for the violence also allows for peace to enter.

It is hard to explain Roger. He founded a monastic community for Protestants who were asked not to leave their own churches but to live together in chastity and simplicity praying three times a day and supporting themselves with their own work. He chose a very little village of nominal Catholics with a priestless but priceless small, ancient parish church. The local bishop allowed them to use it if they posted a sign saying Protestants were inside praying! Today, Protestants and Catholics pray together. In fact, the community founded for Protestants began accepting Roman Catholics as soon as the Roman Church allowed them to join. With Roger's death, the community will be led by a German Roman Catholic brother. From a French Swiss Protestant to a German Catholic means that more than one miracle of reconciliation has taken place.

So it seems a Protestant dreamer with a community of Protestant and Catholic brothers located in the middle of nowhere, with no privacy except in church and in an outdoor space reserved for prayer, terrible food, cold water showers and little on offer except faith sharing, singing, and prayer is laid to rest after a long day's work. Trusted by popes and archbishops of Canterbury as well as tens of thousands of young people, he showed what simple hospitality and prayer offered by otherwise useless monks could do for peace in the world.

The Rev. Halbert Weidner is the pastor of Holy Trinity Church, an Oratorian, and the ecumenical officer for the Roman Catholic diocese of Honolulu.