Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. Father Dominique Pire, a Belgium Roman Catholic Dominican priest, received world-wide recognition after being awarded the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize. With one single nomination for the Nobel candidacy, he received the covet award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his efforts to help refugees to leave their camps and return to a life of freedom and dignity." In the late 1930s, he founded an aid organization, Mutual Family Aid, for poor families, and during World War II, he was an army chaplain in the anti-German resistance movement, while continuing to have refugee camps, which fed thousands of Belgian and French children. He also was an agent for the intelligence service and participant in the underground escape system that returned downed Allied air force pilots to their own forces. After the war, he provided aide through support to the refugee camps in Austria. In the 1950s, he established seven European Villages of small houses for refugees, which are still active in the 21st century, and in 1957 he founded an organization, The Heart Open to the World, which undertook development projects in other parts of the world. He founded the University of Peace at Huy in 1960, which within five years, accomplished Peace seminars with lectures in a number of different languages with 4,000 people from forty countries participating, with the purpose of promoting a better understanding between races. He founded an organization that specializes in conflict prevention. His last project was called Island of Peace, which conducts long term development projects within the populations of several poor countries. Born Dominique Georges Henri Pire, the oldest child of four children, his father was a civil servant. During World War I with the German army's advancement, his family fled by boat from Belgium to Austria as refugees. Upon returning four years later, their home was found in ruins. After studying at the Collège de Bellevue, he entered the Dominican monastery of La Sarte in Huy, Belgium, where he took the name Henri Dominique, saying his final vows on September 23, 1932. He studied Theology and Social Science at the Pontifical International Institute Angelicum in Rome, where he obtained his Doctorate in Theology in 1936, with his thesis "L'Apatheia ou insensibilité irréalisable et destructrice". After a year of study in the social sciences at the University of Louvain in Belgium, he returned to the monastery in Huy at the dawn of World War II. He founded four homes for the aged between 1950 to 1954. In the 1960s he went to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan giving aide to the refugees there, and this project was called Iles de Paix. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Military Cross with Palms, the Resistance Medal with Crossed Swords, the War Medal, and the National Recognition Medal. In 1949 he authored his book about displaced persons, "From the Rhine to the Danube with 60,000 D.P." In 1960, he published his autobiography, "Europe of the Heart." Although he was a Roman Catholic, Pire spoke of a universal concept that is part of most religions or creeds. "Men build too many walls and not enough bridges," Father Dominique Pire said in his address in Oslo, when receiving his Nobel Peace Prize. He died from a complication of surgery at the age of 58.