The gables of Saint-Séverin stand sentinel beside the Rue St Jacques as that historic artery of ancient France gains the Seine and the Ile de la Cité. Pilgrims passed by as they left for Campostella; the broad boulevard and the twisting streets of the old quartier are still the home of cosmopolitan youth flocking to the schools of Paris. Here in fact is a special welcome for them, for besides its native parish Saint-Séverin is charged especially with a mission to the university world of displaced youth struggling to keep body and soul together in a world of perpetual motion. A church with a history adapts itself more easily to broad and generous demands. And from the days of Séverin, a sixth-century south bank solitary, this church has a long history. Fulk preached the Fourth Crusade there; Dante prayed there in the thirteen hundreds; and if subsequently its fame declined somewhat, at least Huysmans at the end of the nineteenth century found the church ravishing and its Masses exquisite.

In 1947 something of a renaissance befell when Cardinal Suhard appointed the Abbé Connan to the parish of Saint-Séverin with a special mandate to revive and transform it into a church and community capable of ‘welcoming’ the students of the Latin Quarter. About the same time the Cardinal entrusted L’Hay-les-Roses to a Benedictine to establish a community capable of welcoming converts from the Mission de Paris. In each case the parish was to be given a chance to prove itself as a competent missionary instrument in the modern world.