Abstract

The community Compagnons de Jésus Charpentier was started by a French priest, Paul Gauthier, in 1956 in Israel. The organisation had the aim of undertaking a form of religious life marked by the insertion in the workers' context, while still following the bishops' rules in the Third World dioceses. The second Vatican Council represented a turning point for this Community, as it offered its members the opportunity to establish relations with bishops from all over the word, thus, extending their presence from the Middle East to Latin America and finally to Southeast Asia. The growing involvement in some popular resistance movements (especially in Brazil and in Jordan) led to the end of the relationship with the Catholic Church and eventually allows historians to measure the «permeability» of religiosity to political dynamics typical of the Cold War in non-European contexts.