Qhen he is not celebrating masses or weddings, Father Matthieu Le Merrer devotes himself to two passions: football and pancakes. The first earned him, just a year ago, the chance to wear the captain’s armband of Espérance sportive de Saint-Benoît (Vienne), a departmental first division club. The second led him, this year, to create a traveling creperie, in food truck mode. His nickname: “Brother Truck”. The paronymic allusion to the monk friend of Robin Hood is not only funny: like Brother Tuck from Sherwood Forest, this 39-year-old diocesan priest hears “give back to the poor”. In this case pancakes “solidarity”inspired by its Breton origins.
Inaugurated at the beginning of April, its converted trailer is set up once a week – on Wednesday or Sunday (after mass) – in the Trois-Cités district, in Poitiers, in the parking lot of a bakery. Accompanied by a volunteer assigned to cash collection, Father Matthieu plays the spatula for four hours. More than two hundred units will come out of its two cast iron billigs that afternoon. The classic butter-sugar is sold for 50 cents, the homemade caramel for 1 euro. Placed not far from a religious icon and a Playmobil decked out in a chasuble, a slate invites you to pay double the price, in order to benefit a poor person, according to the principle of suspended coffee, paid at the bistro for a stranger in need.
But the goal is also to exchange, to dialogue, with a believing clientele or not, through discreet evangelization. In 2022, when celebrating the 10th anniversary of his ordination, Father Matthieu questioned the meaning of his priesthood. “I came to the conclusion that what I liked most about my ministry were the unforeseen meetings, not supervised in advance, he explains. I didn’t want to get stuck in a cult dynamic, not lock myself in my church waiting for people to come, and cry if they don’t come. » Guided by the encyclical Fratelli tuttiof October 2020, of Pope Francis on fraternity and social friendship, this son of a sub-prefect, originally from Trégastel (Côte-d’Armor), then said to himself that a food truck would ideally make it possible to realize her “dream of a Church that moves and reaches out to everyone”.
“The heart of the project is the meeting”
It took two years to finalize the project. It was necessary to create an association, launch an online prize pool, to finance the acquisition not of a truck, but of a refrigerated trailer, purchased from a catering company in Poitiers (including the funeral of the founder, who died in 2019 , were celebrated by the religious). But also find a name (with the help of local scouts), then a slogan (“The crepe for everyone”), train in hygiene standards, obtain the approval of the Bishop of Poitiers…
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