The founder of L’Arche, Jean Vanier, says he is less surprised at being awarded this year’s £1.1-million Templeton Prize than he is at the global success of his idea for a small community where the mentally disabled live side by side with those who assist them Fifty years ago, Jean Vanier, a former Canadian naval officer and philosophy lecturer, invited two mentally disabled men to live with him as friends in Trosly-Breuil, an hour’s drive north of Paris. The idea was that a small community where the mentally disabled live with the people who assist them would be far better than the grim large institutions they were kept in at the time. He called this community L’Arche.Now L’Arche is a web of 147 such communities in 35 countries, most of them residenti