"Empty Your Attics"

It was perishing cold in France last week. Rich women shivered and complained about the difficulty of heating their high-ceilinged rooms, bus riders shivered and told each other that it was the worst winter in two generations, the poor just shivered. By week's end more than 90 were dead of the cold alone--no one knew how many more of pneumonia.

Suddenly Paris was aware that a man was organizing a Resistance against the cold. Bearded and gaunt, wearing a black cape with the flair of an actor, a 41-year-old priest called Abbe Pierre was rocketing through the city in a tiny green Renault, collecting old clothes, setting up distribution points, opening emergency shelters. From radios and the stages of theaters, on street corners and in churches, the soft voice of Abbe Pierre appealed: "My friends, help us!"

And the response was strong. The Ministry of Health doled out 4,000,000 francs. From another ministry came blankets. The army contributed trucks to move supplies, hospitals established dormitories, and municipal buildings were turned into soup kitchens and sleeping halls. The Metro turned over three unused subway stations to Abbe Pierre for shelters against the cold.

The voice of Abbe Pierre went on: "Empty your attics, Parisians. There may be venerable things in them, but they're less venerable than the lives of babies." As the Abbe strode through a tent shelter late last week, a woman in a chic Persian lamb coat handed him $210 collected from friends. "Monsieur 1'Abbe," she cried. "You have awakened us!"

The Soft Touch. That is what Abbe Pierre has been trying to do for a long time. The fifth of eight children of a wealthy Lyons silk manufacturer, Henri Antoine Groues at 18 signed his inheritance over to charity and entered a Capuchin monastery. Eight years later tuberculosis forced him to give up the rigors of monastic life, and he was assigned as a secular priest to the diocese of Grenoble.

After the fall of France he joined the Resistance, helped Jews across the Swiss border, operated a laboratory for forging documents, fought in surprise raids against German and Italian barracks. He was captured by the Italians but escaped to the mountains, where he joined the famed Vercors Maquis and founded an underground newspaper. The Germans chased him to Lyons, where he took the pseudonym Pierre and went to work forging identity cards until things again got too hot. When the war ended, he was a priest with six decorations and no parish--and no great urge to settle down in one.

He went into politics, and in 1946 became a deputy to the National Assembly. But his real vocation slid casually into his life with a young couple and a baby who had just been evicted and had nowhere to go. Abbe Pierre bedded them down in his ramshackle house in a run-down Paris suburb. In no time, the word got around that the "abbe with the beard" was a soft touch. His house became headquarters for the homeless.

The 256,000-Franc Question. Abbe Pierre bought the barrack buildings of an old prisoner-of-war camp on credit and set them up in vacant lots. Here he charged 15-c- for a night's lodging, took in 5,000 people a year and showed a profit. But more money was needed to build more houses, and when an ex-ragpicker suggested collecting junk and selling it, Abbe Pierre promptly organized such an efficient scavenger system that they soon needed a truck.

Abbe Pierre made a pilgrimage to a quiz program, Quitte ou Double (Double or Nothing). He was accepted as a contestant and after a few questions had a stack of francs. Yes, he said, he would try another question. "What is the meaning of F.A.O.?" the master of ceremonies asked. "Food and Agriculture Organization," answered the priest. "Right. Do you want to go on?" asked the M.C. Abbe Pierre made a rapid calculation. "No," he said. The Abbe had 256,000 francs ($730), and the junk business had its first truck.

Less than a year later, there were close to a dozen trucks and a community of the poor, called Emmaus,* working together to collect and process the junk that keeps them alive. Today, three years later, the community has mushroomed to three villages, where no families and 200 single men live in wheelless freight cars, old buses and corrugated metal shanties.

Abbe Pierre puts no religious price tag on membership in his communities. "You'll get your soup whether you believe or not," he tells the people who come. But the Abbe's example has its effect; one group has constructed a shrine to the Virgin out of wood and terra cotta and calls its area Notre Dame des Sans Logis (Our Lady of the Homeless). Behind his own house is a tiny brick chapel where Abbe Pierre regularly says Mass for the two priests, five seminarians and twelve laymen who work with him.

Of Saints & Heroes. Abbe Pierre and the cruel cold have brought a new mood to Paris. He has even established a modern version of the medieval institution of sanctuary by persuading the police to promise that no one in a shelter shall be asked for his identity papers. But Abbe Pierre knows well how quickly a rise in temperature can melt the city's new found concern. "It's not enough to prevent miserable people from dying in the streets," he says. "They have to be helped so they can live like men."

In Abbe Pierre France has a new hero. Two French producers said last week they would make movies about him. In a busy warehouse, an unemployed carpenter looked up from counting emergency-issue blankets to watch the tough Abbe stride past. "There goes another St. Vincent de Paul," he said. "Only better. He's so much more efficient."

* After the village where Christ appeared, after the Resurrection, to his disheartened disciples.

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