Dominique Pire with his father, mother, and siblings.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1955
Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, with Dominican friar Dominique Pire, circa 1955.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1955
Aachen, Germany
Father Dominique Pire in a relocation charity based in Aachen, Germany, for Eastern European refugees. A photograph of Anne Frank is prominent on his desk.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1957
Dominique Pire, a Belgian Dominican monk. Nobel Prize for Peace 1958. Laying of the foundation stone of a European Village.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Dominique Pire
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Problemveien 7, 0315 Oslo, Norway
Belgian Dominican friar Dominique Pire (right), the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving his award from Gunnar Jahn, President of the Norweigan Nobel Prize Committee, at a ceremony at Oslo University, December 11th, 1958.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Rue Brederode 16, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
King Baudouin of Belgian (left) talking to Dominican friar Dominique Pire, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping refugees after World War Two, on the grounds of Brussels Palace, November 26th, 1958.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Rue Brederode 16, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
Portrait of Belgian Dominican friar Dominique Pire, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after helping refugees following World War Two, circa 1958.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Problemveien 7, 0315 Oslo, Norway
Belgian Dominican friar Dominique Pire (right), the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving his award from Gunnar Jahn, President of the Norweigan Nobel Prize Committee, at a ceremony at Oslo University, December 11th, 1958.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Father Georges Dominique Pire with a map and model of refugee villages in Europe.
Gallery of Dominique Pire
1958
Refuge for the stranded of the Second World War: Father Dominique Pire in 1958 in front of a map of Europe with the locations of his refugee villages.
Father Dominique Pire in a relocation charity based in Aachen, Germany, for Eastern European refugees. A photograph of Anne Frank is prominent on his desk.
Belgian Dominican friar Dominique Pire (right), the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving his award from Gunnar Jahn, President of the Norweigan Nobel Prize Committee, at a ceremony at Oslo University, December 11th, 1958.
King Baudouin of Belgian (left) talking to Dominican friar Dominique Pire, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping refugees after World War Two, on the grounds of Brussels Palace, November 26th, 1958.
Belgian Dominican friar Dominique Pire (right), the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving his award from Gunnar Jahn, President of the Norweigan Nobel Prize Committee, at a ceremony at Oslo University, December 11th, 1958.
Dominique Pire was a Belgian cleric and educator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1958 for his aid to displaced persons in Europe after World War II.
Background
Georges Charles Clement Ghislain Pire was born on February 10, 1910, in Dinant, Belgium. He was the eldest child of four born to Georges Pire, Senior, a civic official, and Berthe (Ravet) Pire. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Pire's family fled from Belgium to France in a boat to escape advancing German troops.
After the armistice of 1918, the family was able to return to Dinant, which had been reduced to ruins.
Education
Pire studied Classics and Philosophy at the Collège de Bellevue and at the age of eighteen entered the Dominican priory of Louisiana Sarte in Huy. He took his final vows on 23 September 1932, adopting the name Dominique, after the Order's founder. He then studied theology and social science at the Pontifical International Institute Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum in Rome, where he obtained his doctorate in theology in 1936 with a thesis entitled L’Apatheia ou insensibilité irréalisable et destructrice (Apatheia or unrealisable and destructive insensitivity).
After a year of study in the social sciences at the University of Louvain in Belgium, he returned to the monastery at Huy to teach sociology and moral philosophy.
In 1938, the Reverend Father Pire began his long service of organizational work for the unfortunate by founding the Service d’entr’aide familiale (Mutual Family Aid) and Stations de plein air de Huy (Open Air Camps) for children. During and after World War II the stations were more than camps; they were missions that fed thousands of Belgian and French children.
Constantly supplementing his duties as curé of La Sarte, Father Pire decided early in 1949 to study the refugee problem. He visited the camps for refugees in Austria, wrote a book, Du Rhin au Danube avec 60,000 D. P., and founded an organization, Aid to Displaced Persons.
There were three levels of action in Father Pire’s work for the refugees. There was, first, his "sponsoring" movement in which interested people could "sponsor" a family of refugees, sending parcels and letters of encouragement; by 1960 there were some 18,000 sponsors. On a second level, there were his homes for the aged, four of them, all situated in Belgium: at Huy (1950), Esneux (1951), Aertslaer (1953), and Braine-le-Comte (1954).
It was evident, however, that the refugees needed to have the opportunity to put down roots, to gain economic independence, to achieve psychological wholeness. Consequently, Father Pire conceived the idea of building small villages for them, to be located on the outskirts of a city where these communities would be free to grow, not in the center of a city where they might degenerate into ghettoes. Using private contributions from the "hearts of men," he constructed seven "European Villages," each for about 150 people: at Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany (1956); Bregenz, Austria (1956); Augsburg, Germany (1957); Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Belgium, (the Fridtjof Nansen Village, 1958); Spiesen in the Saar (the Albert Schweitzer Village, 1958); Wuppertal, Germany (the Anne Frank Village, 1959); Euskirchen, Germany (1962). All seven of these villages still exist, each now housing about twenty displaced families.
In 1957, Aid to Displaced Persons, the organization charged with executive authority in carrying out activities on behalf of the refugees, became Aid to Displaced Persons and European Villages, an international charitable association, with self-governing sections in ten European states. The funds spent by this organization on activities for the relief of refugees in 1958 and in later years were raised by a continuous crusade called Europe of the Heart, a crusade aimed at the hearts of all men regardless of religious, national, racial, and linguistic barriers.
After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Father Pire pursued more aggressively a worldwide application of effort. Beginning June 5, 1959, the crusade was henceforth carried on by an official organization known as The Heart Open to the World. Its program is both abstract and concrete, welding human attitudes, and specific actions. The objective is international fraternity; the technique is that of "fraternal dialogue," the agencies are the University of Peace, World Friendships, World Sponsorships, and Islands of Peace.
Father Pire founded the University of Peace at Huy in 1960 and by 1965 had completed a major building, with dormitory space for fifty, a large conference room, and several small ones, kitchen, and dining facilities. The University is open to anyone who wishes to devote himself to constructive work for peace. He may enroll in "long sessions," of two weeks held in the summer or in "short sessions" of two days scheduled throughout the year, or even in individual sessions to hear lectures given in four languages - French, English, German, and Dutch - and to participate in face-to-face fraternal dialogue. About 4,000 people from forty countries have taken part in the sessions of the University.
World Friendships is an agency that encourages fraternal dialogue carried on at a distance by correspondence between people of different heritages. About 6,500 are enrolled in this program. World Sponsorships enables people to sponsor, with material help, refugee families in Africa or in Asia. This program, emphasizing education of children and adolescents, now has about 400 enrolled sponsors or "godparents."
After a Pakistan visit in 1960, Father Pire inaugurated a new venture that would combine local self-help with private international aid in order to increase food production, improve medical services, and develop educational and recreational programs. His idea was to select a rural area made up of several villages, to encourage the people of the area to form organizations that would require intervillage collaboration for specified purposes, to provide these organizations with outside technical experts and some material aid, to devise plans of action with targets to be reached in five or six years, and finally, at the end of the specified period, to turn over the entire program to the initiative of the local inhabitants. The first of these ventures, running from 1962 to 1967, was at Gohira in East Pakistan; the second, begun in 1969, is a six-year program at Kalakkad, near the southern point of the Indian landmass. Father Pire called these programs Islands of Peace.
Throughout his thirty-two years of work for peace and human dignity, Father Henri Dominique Pire lived simply in the monastery at Huy, discharging his religious duties and continuing to lecture. He died at fifty-eight at Louvain Roman Catholic Hospital on January 30, 1969, of complications following surgery.
Father Pire himself during World War II was chaplain to the resistance movement, agent for the intelligence service, and participant in the underground escape system that returned downed Allied flyers to their own forces. For his services, this man of peace was awarded the Military Cross with Palms, the Resistance Medal with Crossed Swords, the War Medal, and the National Recognition Medal.
Views
Quotations:
"Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect."
"Peace is not something to say but something to do."
"There is perhaps no surer road to peace than the one that starts from little islands and oases of genuine kindness, islands, and oases constantly growing in number and being continually joined together until eventually, they ring the world."
"To act without knowledge is folly, to know without acting is cowardice."
Personality
Dominique Pire lived a simple life in the monastery at Huy and spent 32 years of his life in service to humanitarian causes. Even though he was a monk, he refused to mix his personal faith with his commitments to social justice and chose to use a more universal language to spread his messages of peace rather than using explicitly Christian language.
Completely dedicated to humanitarian causes, he founded many organizations whose activities have benefited thousands of people around the world. He always advocated human unity and was an ardent supporter of internationalism.
Connections
Dominique Pire was never married and had no children.