Pierre Maury

Nationality

France

Date of Birth

1980

Date of Death

1956

Political
Preference

Christian

Pierre Maury was born in Montauban and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Berlin. He came back in 1910 to study theology in Montauban. Maury became a noteworthy pastor in French Protestant circles and is seen as one of the foremost French ecumenical leaders.

After the armistice of the First World War, he was appointed secretary-general of the French Federation of Christian Students Associations from 1919 till 1925. In 1925, Maury was appointed pastor to the Ferney-Voltaire parish and met Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, who was then secretary general of the Universal Christian Student Federation in Geneva. Pierre Maury worked in the Christian student movement with Visser’t Hooft for 5 years.

In 1930 he became the director of Foi et Vie magazine, which dealt with the Protestant expression of religious culture as well as societal problems. Maury met Karl Barth in 1936 during the International Calvin Congress where he held a lecture on “Election and Faith” and inspired Barth. They became friends. A year later, Maury attended the Oxford Conference in 1937 and was one of the keynote speakers. During this conference, Maury was fearful of a social gospel which lured the church into secular reform movements and reaffirmed that the distinctive task of the Church was to confess its faith in one Lord, with open doors for all to hear. In 1943, he joined Marc Boegner, President of the French Protestant Federation, at the Passy-Annonciation Reformed parish in Paris, and stayed there until his death in 1956. Maury was the French delegate in the group of ecumenists that travelled to Stuttgart in October 1945 to reconcile the ecumenical movement with the churches in Germany, which was an event that prefigured political reconciliation between European countries. In 1950 he became President of the National Council of the French Reformed Church and member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.