The Witness of the Tibhirine Martyrs

God is love (I John 4, 8). God is communion. Salvation is sharing in the intimate life of communion between the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. Christ is the faithful witness (o mártus o pistós; Apoc. 1, 5), the martyr par excellence, the primordial sacrament of salvation, because he is the visible manifestation on earth of the Father's salvific design for the whole human race. The Church in its turn is the sacrament of Christ, because it also is the visible manifestation of this same reality among men and women of the same faith, the same hope and the same love.

The death of Christ was not an isolated act. It was the culminating point of his whole life. So is it also in the life and death of his disciples. They are called to witness with their whole lives. Those called "martyrs" are those who have accepted aviolent death rather than be unfaithful to the witness they have given throughout theirlives. A Christian is a martyr, therefore, first of all, by his life, his life lived to the end.

The African Church at the time of Tertullian and Cyprian possessed a great crown of martyrs. Again, in the course of recent years, in North Africa many witnesses of Christ have undergone a violent death as the logical sequence of their life of communion in the name of the Gospel. Many of them have left no trace in the press, and remain known to God alone. The deaths of some of them are better known and have attracted attention. Of all those who have witnessed unto death in Algeria in the course of the last seven years, the seven monks of Tibhirine have probably attracted the most attention and received the greatest show of affection and interest. But prior to them, eleven other ministers of the Gospel in the diocese of Algiers died violent deaths in the exercise of their ministry of communion. After them there was another great witness of the faith, the bishop of Oran, Pierre Claverie.

My words here bear essentially on the witness of the seven monks of Tibhirine, my brothers in the Cistercian Order, whom I had the grace of knowing personally. Nonetheless I wish to say something about the other martyrs of the Church of Algiers of the same period, and describe the context in which all these witnesses were led to shed their blood.

The Christian Witnesses of Algeria

On May 8, 1994, Sister Paule-Hélène Saint-Raymond and Brother Henry Vergès were assassinated in the library they ran for the young people of a crowded section of Algiers. On October 2 of the same year, Sister Esther Paniagua and Sister Caridad María Alvarez were struck down in front of the chapel in Bab-el-Oued. On December 27, still in 1994, four White Fathers were assassinated in their house at Tizi-Ouzou: Fathers Alain Dieulangard, Charles Deckers, John Chevillard, and Christian Chessel. On September 1995, Sister Denise Leclercq and Sister Jeanne Littlejohn were assassinated at Belcourt with two bullets in the head. Finally, on November 10, 1995 Sister Odette Prévost was killed and Sister Chantal Galicher was wounded as they were leaving their house in the Kouba district.

A certain constant element can be noted in these deaths. All these persons had established friendly relations with the Algerian people, and lived in close connection with the common people, whose life they shared. All were killed in the milieu where they lived and worked. The clear message given by the assassins--or by those who directed them--was that this proximity and this brotherliness were precisely the disturbing elements they wished to get rid of. They were not reproached for proselytizing, and they were not doing so. They were reproached for being persons-of-communion, and for condemning by their very lives all forms of exclusion and every form of...