Jean Vanier was born in 1928 to Canadian parents in Geneva, where his father, a general, served as military adviser to the League of Nations. At twelve, shaken by the Second World War, he decided to enter the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He left the Navy in 1950 and believed he had found his true calling in the priesthood. He moved to L'Eau Vive, a Christian community of students founded by the Dominican Thomas Philippe on the poor outskirts of Paris, near the Dominican convent Le Saulchoir. A year after Vanier arrived, Father Thomas stepped down as director and handed the role to him. The shift created a rupture with the convent: the Dominicans resented that leadership had passed to a layman. Difficult years followed until the local bishop asked Jean to resign. The expulsion left Vanier in a state of uncertainty and loneliness like the one he had known seven years earlier, leaving the Navy. He decided not to finish his final year of seminary preparation and spent time at the Trappist monastery of Bellefontaine, then lived alone on a small farm, and finally spent years in a cottage in Fatima. After earning his degree in philosophy in 1962, he accepted a position teaching moral philosophy at Saint Michael's College in Toronto.
But a year later, his life changed again. Father Thomas, now chaplain at Val Fleuri in Trosly–Breuil, a house serving people with mental disabilities, invited him back to France. Vanier bought an old, dilapidated house in the village and, beginning in spring 1964, started visiting institutions, care homes, and psychiatric hospitals. He was shocked by the violence that accompanied the daily lives of those confined there. That August brought the turning point: Jean welcomed two men with mental disabilities, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, into his home. L'Arca was born—today it has 154 communities spread across five continents. Two are in Italy: Il Chicco in Ciampino and Arcobaleno in Quarto Inferiore, near Bologna. In 1971, with Marie–Hélène Mathieu, Vanier founded Fede e Luce.
The author of more than thirty books translated worldwide, the philosopher, philanthropist, writer, and founder received many honors, among them the Paolo VI Prize for his work advancing the development and progress of peoples (1997) and the prestigious Templeton Prize (2015).
Vanier's life was not without great sorrows, the most recent of which marked his final years. In 2014, two adult women without disabilities reported to L'Arca and the Church that they had been victims of sexual violence for decades at the hands of Father Thomas (who died in 1993) during the 1970s and 1980s, when he was their spiritual director. L'Arca requested a canonical inquiry. It began immediately and ran from December 2014 to March 2015, collecting testimony from fourteen people and confirming all the allegations. On April 6, 2017, at the request of some victims and with their help in preparation, a Mass of reparation was celebrated at Trosly–Breuil for those deeply wounded by Father Thomas. The victims attended, along with leaders of L'Arca and three bishops. Father Thomas's crimes do not diminish the project of L'Arca, its beauty, or the profound and prophetic witness it has given and continues to give to the world on behalf of people with and without mental disabilities. Yet they caused, and continue to cause, tremendous suffering—above all in Jean Vanier himself, who died of cancer in Paris on May 7, 2019.