Life donated

Ten years ago, exactly on 23 May 1996, a communiqué of the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group) announced that on the morning of 21 May it had brutally assassinated the seven monks of the monastery of Tibhirine. They died as martyrs, in a period in which Algeria had fallen into a vicious circle of unprecedented massacres. With a series of communications – planned throughout May – France too has joined with Algeria in paying tribute to the seven monks. Events in their memory were held in Paris, the city from which Father Christian de Chergé, prior of the monastery, came, and also at Valence, hometown of two other members of the community, and at Marseilles where the monks will be commemorated with a performance called “Speaking stones”. WITNESSES OF THE ABSOLUTE IN A MOSLEM COUNTRY . It was in 1996. On the night between the 26 and 27 March a group of twenty or so men erupted into the monastery of Tibhirine, seized the seven monks and took them prisoner. The arrival of Islamic fundamentalists that night could not have taken the monks by surprise. They had been used to receiving similar visits since 1993. But the monks had always decided to remain. On 27 April, a communiqué of the GIA proposed an exchange of prisoners: “if you liberate, we will liberate; if you don’t, we’ll cut their throats. Efforts were immediately made to secure their release, also in Rome, where John Paul II made a personal intervention on their behalf: “I appeal – he said during an Angelus – to the sense of human brotherhood, in requesting the immediate liberation of these religious who have chosen to remain [in Algeria], as witnesses of the Absolute, among the Moslem population, with whom they were able to forge ties of friendship and mutual respect”. The news of their barbarous assassination came on 23 May. A week later, their bodies were found close to Medea (only later did it emerge that only their heads were found). Shrouded in silence and under the shade of the cypress trees, Christian, Luc, Christophe, Michel, Bruno, Célestin and Paul now rest at Tibhirine, in the land they had loved so much. On 1st August 1996, in the same year as their martyrdom, Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran was also killed. He was the last Christian victim of a decade of violence in Algeria. A LIFE DONATED TO GOD AND TO ALGERIA . On the tenth anniversary of their death, it is worth recalling a passage from the spiritual testament left by Father Christian de Chergé to his family. After his death they presented it to the French Catholic daily “La Croix” so that they would publish it as widely as possible. “If the day should come – and it could come today – in which I fall victim to the terrorism which seems now to target all foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was donated to God and to this country… My death, surely, will prove right those who have hastily called me an ingénu and an idealist; but they should know that I will have finally fulfilled my deepest desire. I will in this way be able to be pleasing in God’s eyes, and to immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with Him his sons of Islam as he sees them”. THE PROCESS OF BEATIFICATION . To honour the anniversary of this martyrdom, the Church of Algeria has in recent days revived the request to open the diocesan process for the cause of their beatification. The French Catholic paper La Croix – reconstructing the current state of the process – reports that the Archbishop of Algiers Henri Teissier had already asked for the nulla osta of Rome a year ago, in an application to the Congregation for the Cause of Saints, which in turn will have to verify with the Secretariat of State whether there might exist impediments of a diplomatic order to the opening of the process. In view of the delicacy of the question, it is a process that requires time. In fact, the cause of the seven monks of Tibhirine is being combined with that of a further 12 “Martyrs of the Church of Algeria”, men and women religious killed between 1994 and 1996, for whom the Church of Algeria plans to proceed in a single process of beatification. These religious – explains Archbishop Henri Teissier – “died in fidelity to a mission received from the Church and in fidelity to an evangelical relation of friendship with the Algerian people”. While awaiting the nulla osta from Rome, the work of collecting the eyewitness accounts, affidavits and writings necessary for the dossier on beatification has already begun. Archbishop Teissier is said to have already appointed a postulator, Brother Giovanni Bigotto, a Marist monk, who is about to publish a booklet called “Blood of Love”, in which he provides an introduction to these 19 martyrs and their congregations. They were men and women “filled with passionate love for their Church – he writes – of which they were jealous and indefatigable servants” and “also filled with passionate love for Algeria and its people with whom they had forged relations of friendship”.