Champion of developmentally disabled wins Templeton Prize
Play
London (dpa) - A French-Canadian activist who integrated people with developmental disabilities into communities by spending five decades "living with deeply vulnerable people" has won the 2015 Templeton Prize for spiritual progress.
Jean Vanier, 86, founded the L'Arche organisation in France in 1964and developed it into a network of 147 communities in 35 countries "where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers," the John Templeton Foundation said.
"They have taught me about what it means to be human and about how our societies can be transformed to become more peaceful and unified," Vanier said of L'Arche's members.
"Our society will really become human as we discover that the strong need the weak, just as the weak need the strong," he said.
Vanier was also rewarded for his "years of leadership efforts across the globe to nurture dialogue and unity among Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and other faiths."
He joins 44 former winners of the 1.1-million-pound(1.7-million-dollar) annual prize, including the Dalai Lama in 2012, Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 2013, and Czech priest and philosopher Tomas Halik last year. The Templeton Prize honours "a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension."
The late US-British financier and philanthropist John Templeton established the prize in 1972 for "entrepreneurs of the spirit,"making the first award to Mother Theresa in 1973.
