Letter to Members – 11 June 2012

Dear friends,

Those in deepest poverty, and all those who strive for justice, have just lost a true champion and a great friend. Bernadette Cornuau passed away on Saturday, 9 June after a long illness.

Whilst visiting her a few days ago, she told us: “This movement has matured; I can leave you.” When we reminded her that she had helped build ATD Fourth World’s foundations, she added: “No one wanted us, no one listened to us.”

Bernadette was one of the first to come to the emergency housing camp in Noisy-le-Grand and meet Father Joseph Wresinski. She was a personal assistant to a company director when she first went to see this “homeless camp” she had heard about. She wanted to know whether she could be of use to the people living there. And it was a small boy, alone in the mud, who called out to her: “Last night, my dad smashed up everything at home.” At his request, she took him back to his house. From that moment, her life would never be the same. Every Sunday, she met up with a group of girls for which Father Joseph had asked her to take responsibility. He greeted her every time their paths crossed in the camp saying “Hello faithful!”

Her first involvement as a full-time ATD Volunteer was in La Campa, another camp near Paris. She moved into a caravan there so she could be with the families. She was to succeed in getting the camp’s children into a local school that had refused them entry.

Bernadette was also the first ATD Volunteer to meet up with families and activists involved in the War on Poverty in New York. From this time in New York, she was to mirror Wresinski’s determination to leave no one on their own in the fight against poverty. She continued to apply this when accompanying and supporting the ATD Fourth World teams in developing their programs in different parts of the world.

Asked by Wresinski to return to France, she joined families living in another shantytown before accepting responsibility for the ATD in Noisy-le-Grand at a time when the emergency camp was being replaced by a housing complex for homeless families. Misunderstood more often than not, she doggedly sought to make Noisy-le-Grand a pilot project that would showcase the right of the most vulnerable families to exist and have somewhere to belong.

In supporting Wresinski during his first visits to Great Britain, Guatemala and Brazil, she contributed to ATD Fourth World opening up to wider, more international development. With her passion and commitment, she wanted the Volunteer Corps and ATD as a whole to develop its capacity to be active in the most abandoned communities. She was especially concerned that the ATD Fourth World strengthen its links with friends in Israel and Palestine.

Her radical approach in facing up to what was inacceptable in people’s lives led her towards developing a deep understanding of human rights. For example, she mobilized people throughout the north of France in the legal defence of a family accused of neglecting their children, a family that was reduced to burning planks from their wooden shack to keep out the cold. Also in the north of France, she took up the cause of children shut away in awful conditions in psychiatric hospitals, children who were deprived of their freedom and any prospect of a normal future.

Bernadette epitomised the requirement that in everything we do, we seriously question whether our projects enable the poorest people to gain in happiness, freedom and responsibility.

After founder Joseph Wresinski’s death in 1988, Bernadette directed most of her strength towards supporting the governance of ATD Fourth World and ensuring that it remained people-centered and rooted in shared experiences across a diverse community. Whilst respecting their freedom, she offered unfailing support to each international leadership team, sharing with them her deep sense of the need both for continuity and for innovation at all levels.

Over the past ten years, many of you have visited Bernadette whilst she has been serenely facing up to an illness which gradually took hold of her and yet never undermined her inner peace and her laughter. The many of us who have been lucky enough to meet Bernadette remember the importance she gave to choosing her words, and her authentic way of building relationships with everyone in ways that reinforced their sense of freedom.

More than the struggle she was engaged in, Bernadette’s commitment was to enable people to realiZe their own importance. “That absolutely everybody be considered and treated as the human being that they are. That they discover and value their own personality.”

With Bernadette, our determination and our confidence are further strengthened.

Eugen Brand, Isabelle Perrin, Diana Faujour, International Leadership Team.