Jacques Loew OP (31 August 1908 – 14 February 1999) was a French Dominican friar and priest, who founded both the Mission ouvrière Saints-Pierre-et-Paul [fr] and – with René Voillaume – the School of the Faith in Fribourg, Switzerland.
[2] He later studied law and political science in Paris, before finishing his schooling at the Sanatorium Universitaire in Leysin, Switzerland, due to a case of tuberculosis.
[1][6][3][5] Between 1942 and 1944, Loew and about ten priests established the Popular Family Movement (Mouvement populaire des familles; MPF) and four of them requested the Bishop of Marseilles, Jean Delay [fr], authorize them to begin evangelizing "in the framework of a missionary parish".
[2] In November 1945, Delay entrusted the parish of Saint-Louis [fr], a working-class neighborhood in northern Marseilles, to two diocesans – Jean Gentile and Georges Hallauer – and two Dominican religious – Loew and André Piet.
[6] Loew eventually advocated that some priests should work in labor, such as car factories, in order to better understand the everyday lives of their flocks.
[1] Despite Loew's defense, the worker-priests in Marseilles were ordered to stop work in the summer of 1953[2] and Pope Pius XII formally condemned the movement in 1954.
[2][1][5] In 2006, the School of the Faith was dissolved and converted into the Jacques Loew International Foundation which is a French-language biblical scholarship group operating in Curitiba, Brazil; Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire; Wrocław, Poland; and Fribourg.