Goodbye to a man of God, and of deep humanity

The thing about our cat Misty is that he’s a pretty good judge of character. The character he likes is one that exudes warmth, and kindness, and calm. In Antoine, he found all those qualities.

Misty makes his feelings forcefully clear. He would lie on my knees for a while, if I begged him to, but if he felt my stroking becoming casual or inattentive, he would reach a languid paw around and scratch me. If I still didn’t mend my ways, he would eventually bite a finger and, though he was never so vulgarly brutal as to draw blood, nonetheless when he bit me, I knew I’d been bitten.

Eventually, he would simply leave my lap and look for something, or better still someone, more congenial to lie on.

With Antoine, during the several days he and his wife Lilly spent with us in England nearly ten years ago, it could hardly have been more different. Misty would jump up, not just once but evening after evening, and lie on his lap for hours at a time. Imagine my astonishment. Imagine my jealousy.

Antoine effortlessly established the relationship
with Misty that has forever eluded me

“What do you expect?” my wife Danielle would say. “You get distracted. You fidget. You’re too damn neurotic.”

She was right, of course. But understanding the problem didn’t make me feel any better. Especially as I knew that the only way I’d get Antoine’s easy relationship with Misty was to be more like him. And that would need a personality transplant.

Because Antoine was a pretty special man.

He was born in 1940, in south western France. His parents were from Alsace in Eastern France, but war was raging at the time, and Germany viewed the region not as French but as occupied national territory. Many of its inhabitants had fled westward ahead of the invading German armies.

They came back after the fighting, however, and Antoine was brought up in Saint Louis, a little market town just on the border with Switzerland, near the great Swiss city of Basel. Danielle comes from Hegenheim, one of the small villages dotted in the countryside around the town. We are in fact related and, as they say, blood’s thicker than water though, to be honest, in my case, that’s more metaphorical than literal. Antoine was my wife’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Still, I’m proud to think of him as family.

The bond that made us relatives was formed in 1965, when he married Lilly. A 55-year marriage of loyalty and mutual support. A precious achievement and one that isn't that common in our days.

Antoine’s first choice of career was as a teacher. But he was also from that minority of Frenchmen who are Protestant, from what they call the ‘Reformed Church’. These were originally the followers of John Calvin, the rather tougher version of Protestant than Luther, whose views are more to the taste of, say, the Church of England.

So when he did his teacher training, he did much of it in institutions of the Reformed Church. Which is a curious phenomenon, in secular France, proud to stand independent of any church, and where, consequently, teachers employed by the state are strictly neutral with regard to faith. 

That’s one of the things that makes Alsace so particular.

Napoleon, a man who liked to keep things firmly under his own control and resented the Church – the Roman Catholic Church – being a bit of an alternative pole of power, signed a so-called Concordat with the Pope. Under it, priests would be paid by the state – they would, in effect, be civil servants. Similarly, religious education including the training of priests, would be provided by the state.

This sounds like a great deal for the church, which would be freed of a huge burden of cost. But Napoleon was also establishing his control over this huge and powerful institution. Wily fellow, he knew what he was doing.

Then in 1871, following a short war which ended disastrously for France, Germany took control of Alsace and the department of the Moselle in nearby Lorraine. In a fit of generosity, it agreed to respect local law. So the Concordat remained in place under German rule. 

The rest of France, on the other hand, did away with it in the coming decades, as it moved to its modern, secular existence.

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Alsace and Moselle were reincorporated into France. Which, like Germany in 1871, also agreed to respect local law. 

This means that Alsace and Moselle are the only parts of France where state and church are not separate, and priests are still civil servants. A status that has been extended to Protestant pastors and Jewish Rabbis. Imams are not the equivalent in Islam to priests or rabbis – they’re more like learned men who lead prayers – or they too would be offered the same status.

That means that Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, has the only faculty of Theology in a public, state university in France.

As Antoine progressed in his studies, he felt increasingly drawn towards faith itself and not simply general education. He eventually signed up in the faculty of Theology and did his degree there. The experience taught him a lot, not least that there were other kinds of Protestants: “I discovered in Strasbourg,” he would write, “that there were also Lutherans!”

He became a pastor, and “my first pastoral position in Bischwiller a few years later would plunge me into Reformed Church-Lutheran cohabitation”. This would become the guiding principle of his approach to faith. When, in 1988, he was elected President of the Council of the synod of Reformed Churches in Alsace and Lorraine, in effect head of the Reformed faith in Eastern France, he would preside over the move of his branch of the Church into the glorious red sandstone Church of St Thomas in Strasbourg, joining the Lutherans there.

Re-elected three times, he remained president of the council until 2000, notably extending his inter-faith work to create a joint organisation of Lutherans and Reformed Church followers, and ultimately to co-sign, with Catholics and Jews, the agreement proposed by the then mayor of Strasbourg to build a huge new mosque in the city. Where there’s room for one faith, there’s room for many faiths, seems to have been his philosophy.

During their visit to us in England in September 2010
Above with Lilly, walking with our dog Janka, in Stafford
Below, with me in Dovedale, on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border

Long before he came to visit us in England, it was in St Thomas’s Church that our paths crossed. An close Italian friend of ours there, Raffaela, was due to be visited by her parents. Her father had been organist in residence at the legendary opera house of La Scala in Milan and in the Duomo. St Thomas’s has a wonderful old organ that was played by Mozart during a visit to the city. Danielle was able to arrange for the Milanese organist to spend a little time playing the same organ, letting his fingers run over the same keys that the great composer had touched.

That too was all thanks to Antoine.

During the final years of my mother-in-law's life, both he and Lilly offered precious help to her, and to us, by visiting her and looking after her in ways that were beyond us, living as we were in England while she was in Strasbourg. Another case of their unstinting kindness. Another reason to feel both pleasure and gratitude towards them both.

No wonder a man like that won a way to the heart of Misty, in a way I couldn’t. But, much more to the point, a way to the hearts of so many men and women throughout Eastern France and beyond. Like so many others who knew him, I shall feel a gap in my own life created by the end of his. He died in February of this year.

A remarkable man. A man of God and a fine man for humanity. One I’m sorry to have lost, but who I shall continue to be proud to call a relative – however tenuous that relation may be – and, above all, a friend.

Antoine Pfeiffer, 27 February 1940, Périgueux – 19 February 2021, Strasbourg.