Father Jean-Claude Chupin O.FM. died on April 5, 2026, at the motherhouse of the Community of the Lamb, which he helped found in the 1970s. He was 94.
When he faced illness in 2023, he was called by Pope Francis, who told him, “I know you’re ill, and I am praying for you.”
Brother Claude, who had helped bring the Community of the Lamb to Argentina, answered in Spanish, “Thank you! I’m praying for you too, as you always request.”
The religious congregation’s motherhouse is in St. Pierre, France, but it has locations in eight countries. Its members are known for living among the poor, going door-to-door to beg for food, and for their beautiful liturgies which were developed using elements of Eastern and Western Catholic rites. While he remained a Franciscan, Father Jean-Claude accompanied the new congregation from its beginnings, gaining a formal role in 1994.
Poverty was his great love
Father Jean-Claude’s life was spent very close to the poor — so much so, he was homeless for a decade.
“For St. Francis, it was the leper. For Brother Jean-Claude, it was the homeless,” explained one of the sister's of the community. After years of requesting permission, his Franciscan order gave him the green light to live with the homeless at age 50 in 1982, while continuing his work with the Community of the Lamb by letter and through the congregation’s chapter meetings.
On the streets, he saw it as his mission to listen to the poor with love rather than preaching any particular message. As he put it in 1989, “Prostrating before the Poor One but not prostrating before a poor one is a contradiction that we must try absolutely to remove from our life.”
Father Jean-Claude once said, “Why is God poor? Because he is love. And love means that he gives himself; he keeps nothing for himself.”
He returned to life with the homeless on a mission later in his life, in 2005 at age 73. He and his companions asked a group of Afghani refugees to stay with them. “It would be an honor to have you,” they said. “Don’t worry about getting cardboard boxes. We can offer them to you, because you’re our guests!”
The center of his life was the Gospel
At the end of his life, St. John the Evangelist is said to have said just the word “Love” in his homilies, summing up his message. Father Jean-Claude would say, “The Gospel! The Gospel! The Gospel!” to begin each of his homilies.
“He never strayed from the Gospel. From the moment he settled in Saint-Pierre, he spent every morning poring over the Gospel,” said the Prior of the Little Brothers of the lamb, Father François-Dominique.
The formation of the Little Sisters and Little Brothers of the Lamb consisted, in part, with listening to and transcribing Father Jean-Claude’s homilies.
One “honorary member” of the Community of the Lamb says he knows why. Kansas City Kansas Emeritus Archbishop Joseph Naumann said, “I personally found Father Jean-Claude’s method of manducating the Word of God very helpful. … It was a tool that allowed the Gospel to penetrate the heart.”
Archbishop Naumann’s retirement residence is a small house built beside the Little Brothers of the Lamb home in a poor neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas.
He was called from childhood
Jean-Claude was born September 29, 1931. In the early 1940s, he had an experience (he was 11 or 12 years old) that he vividly remembered. He woke up on his bed by the fireplace of his home in Western France, and he was crying.
When his parents asked him what was wrong, he said that St. Francis had called him to follow him, and then he woke up to find a Franciscan scapular on his pillow.
Though they told him it fell off the mantelpiece, the boy was convinced it was a sign from God.
“St. Francis was giving me a sign of friendship,” he told a community member in a 2012 recorded interview. He would forget the episode for years but remember it a long time later, when “doubts of all kinds have crossed my path,” he said.
He would often tell the story of a second experience of his calling, when he became convinced of his vocation on a sailboat off the coast of France.
“I entered the Franciscans with my eyes truly closed, headfirst, and when I emerged from the water, I was wearing the Franciscan habit, and my heart was Franciscan,” he said.
Later, he heard a call within his call
“Right from the start, St. Francis seemed to me an evangelical man who could truly lead me to Jesus,” he said. St. Francis also led him to St. Dominic.
Church traditions say the two 13th-century founders of mendicant orders met once and embraced. In the early 1970s, after the Second Vatican Council, the two embraced again, symbolically, at the creation of the Community of the Lamb, when a group of Roman Dominican sisters were sent to Vézelay, France, from Paris.
Father Jean-Claude preached a retreat to the sisters, including their founder, Little Sister Marie (the community does not use surnames, or the titles “Mother” and “Father,” using “little brother” and “little sister” for all members). He also met a new Dominican priest who was close to the order — the Austrian Father Christoph Schönborn, who would later become the editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rise to the level of a cardinal in the Catholic Church.
“Little Sister Marie and he were very united, yet at the same time corrected one another,” Cardinal Schönborn said. “This is something that has contributed to the wellbeing of the Community and cultivated a spirit of freedom.”
Cardinal Schönborn will preside over his funeral Mass.
Father Jean-Claude died on Easter at Vespers as the members of the Community of the Lamb surrounded him, singing the Magnificat — a beautiful end to a beautiful life.