Father Christian de Cherge was the Prior of the
Monastery of Our Lady of Atlas, and his tragic martyrdom was presented in the
movie Of Gods and Men.
But he is a hero for how he lived, not how he died.
Born into a French military family, Christian first
met Islam when he was five and his family was stationed in Algeria. He was moved by the prayer life of the
Muslims around him, and his mother taught him to respect their search for God.
As a twenty-three year old seminarian, de Cherge
returned to Algeria in 1959 to complete his compulsory military service. Technically a French soldier fighting against
the Algerians, Christian formed an unlikely friendship with a Muslim police
officer named Mohamed a father of ten.
They would take long walks together and discuss religion, politics, and
life. But on one of these walks the two
men were ambushed by Algerian rebels. De
Cherge, dressed in his military fatigues, would have been killed on the spot
but for Mohamed interceding and convincing the men to let the young Frenchman
go free.
“I will pray for you,” was all de Cherge could say
to his friend. The next morning Mohamed
was murdered for what he’d done. From
then on, Christian committed himself to peacemaking in Algeria. He was a brilliant student, and the hierarchy
had him pegged as a rising star in the Church.
But Christian wanted the lonely desert of Algeria, not Paris. After ordination, he studied Arabic, Islam,
and the Quran, and eventually had his request to return to Africa granted in
1971.
There, in Tibhirine, Algeria, in the shadows of the
Atlas Moutains, he would become the Prior of the Trappist monastery. For decades he and his fellow monks lived with their
Muslim neighbors in peace. His form of evangelism was to offer the locals
employment, medical care, and literacy tutoring. De Cherge also organized an annual interfaith
conference to foster Muslim-Christian dialogue, and even invited Muslims to
stay at the monastery as his special guests.
But as the
relationship between the Christian monks and the Muslim community grew, the
radical Islamist group GIA became more agitated. Several times Fr. Christian and his monks
were advised to leave, but after prayer and reflection they decided to stay as
witnesses to the reality of the peaceful Christian-Muslim co-existence that had
been established.
Just after midnight
on March 27, 1996 twenty heavily armed GIA soldiers broke into the monastery
and took seven of the monks, including Fr. Christian, hostage. One month later, after the French had refused
to negotiate, the extremists released a letter stating that they had beheaded
the monks.
After news of her
son’s death reached Christian’s mother, she opened a letter he’d given her two
years earlier, “to be opened in the event of my death”. In it, he predicted that he would die at the
hands of extremists, and then closed his letter by addressing his ‘friend of
the last moment”—his murderer:
“…Yes, I want this thank you and this good-bye to be a ‘God Bless’
for you, too, because in God’s face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves
in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both.”
The cause for Fr.
Christian de Cherge’s beatification has been opened. He is a saint for our troubled times; a true peacemaker who loved beyond limits.
Christian de Cherge is a hero you should know. And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.
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