The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria

Introduction

I first met Robert de Chergé in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel Concorde in Lyons. I had written him of my interest in doing a book about the monks of Tibhirine, whose prior, Christian de Chergé, was his younger brother. He had immediately replied to me in Paris, where I was staying at the time, and invited me to come down to talk. I was somewhat nervous about meeting this retired general from the nuclear artillery branch of the French army who was the designated doorkeeper for screening journalists, writers, and others seeking access to the monks’ families.

The story of the kidnapping and murder of seven French Trappist monks in Algeria had been all over the European press during the summer of 1996. Their monastery of Notre-Dame de l’Atlas in Tibhirine was known as a place of friendship between Muslims and Christians. For four years, both the monastery and the village nearby had been spared the violence that raged in the mountains around them. The monks eventually became victims in a struggle among Muslims for a more just society, a struggle that had gone horribly wrong and had cost from 60,000 to 100,000 Algerian lives by 1996. Yet the monks were not martyrs to their faith. They did not die because they were Christians. They died because they wouldn’t leave their Muslim friends, who depended on them and who lived in equal danger.

Emotions were still raw one year later, and the monks’ families had felt put-upon by the many callers from the media. So it was with some relief when a tall, lanky man with tousled gray hair, sans cravate, wearing a half-zippered suede jacket, and an inquisitive smile came up to greet me. At their apartment on the rue Auguste-Comte, his wife, Anne, joined us in the living room where a gentle interrogation began before dinner.

Are Americans really interested in reading about Algeria? Why are you interested in French monks?

American interest in Algeria per se, I said, was probably limited to a few academic specialists and oil companies. But there was an interest in understanding the violence done in the name of Islam and in the broader problem of how different kinds of people can live together peacefully. I explained that I had spent a sabbatical year in France in 1994–1995 with my family and, while there, had met Christians and Muslims who were trying to understand one another better. The Muslims I got to know impressed me with their warmth and hospitality, and their respect for Jesus Christ. Five million Muslims live in France, almost 8 percent of the population of a country where I had witnessed growing anxiety about the Arab, fueled by high unemployment, crime, ignorance, and racism. Every year, more Muslims from around the world are coming to live in the United States, where similar problems of ignorance and acceptance exist. To most non-Muslims, the face of Islam is one of terror and fanaticism. Muslims who love Christians, and Muslims who risk their lives speaking out against terrorism, tell of other Islams.

As to my interest in French monks, I said that the monks were not really French. To my mind, their country was that of the Gospels. They belonged to everyone, even Americans and Muslims. These men represented my understanding of what Christianity should be. Love God, but love thy neighbor first. The problem is always the neighbor. Theirs was a respectful love that accepted that God speaks to people in different ways. They were practicing their faith without ulterior motives in a Muslim country where spreading the Good News is not permitted.

I also wanted to understand better what it means to be Christian. Does being baptized make one Christian? Does professing love of Jesus make one a Christian? To lead a Christian life, does one have to be Christian? And why have Christians all too often been bad advertisements for Christianity—dividing and excluding, rather than uniting people—just as certain so-called Muslims are now doing in Algeria? Is the problem with scripture, or with people? I thought the story of these monks and the Muslims whose lives they shared held a clue.

Finally, I told the general, the published writings of his brother had appealed to me. As a young soldier in Algeria during the war of independence, Christian had found in the Muslims a people more devoted to prayer and serving God than in supposedly Christian France. He sought to expand his Christianity, to make a place for Islam, and to seek the notes that are in harmony. He was a unifier, not a separator. Christian de Chergé’s Christianity interested me.

A month later Robert sent me the names and addresses of the relatives of other monks, as well as those of his siblings who were willing to meet with me. Over the next two years, I met with the families of the other monks to learn who these men were and why they had gone to Algeria. But talking with the relatives of the monks was like meeting only half the family, for a Trappist has two—his blood family, from which he is separating himself, and the new family he adopts when he enters the order. He takes on a new first name, symbolic of his new identity in Christ. The abbot becomes his father, and fellow monks, his brothers. He forsakes his worldly wealth for his monk’s habit. At death, his few personal possessions—books, papers, and writings—belong to the Order.

The seven monks who died had gone to Algeria from three different Trappist monasteries in France: Notre-Dame d’Aiguebelle, in the Rhône valley near Montélimar; Notre-Dame de Tamié, located in the mountains of Savoy, below Lake Annecy; and Notre-Dame de Bellefontaine, in the flat farm country of Anjou. Staying at each of the monasteries from where they began their calling, I experienced the rhythms and sensibilities of Trappist life and, from their former brothers, I learned more about the men and their lives in the Atlas.

I also began to better understand why my exposure to the Trappist culture had a certain resonance for me. Simplicity is one reason. Doing less, not more, and doing those fewer things more intensely, are values in perpetual struggle for survival in a world that is always offering more—more activities, more choices, more means of communication, things that distract and require decisions. Trappists have stripped their lives down to a simple triad of prayer, study, and manual labor. They have made only one decision: to love and praise God in the Trappist way. Their way is that of obedience, humility, and charity, practiced in a working community of brothers wedded in Jesus Christ. They are practical, quiet, and frugal as they go about earning a living by making products that come from the land.

The dualities of Trappist life also appeal to me—solitude and community, meditation and action, love and discipline. Trappist monks are both community-disciplined and self-disciplined, though they would say God-disciplined. They live as a community whose rhythms of work and devotion provide a harness to their daily life. Each monk has freely chosen this discipline in order to excel at love by purging his soul of the dross of envy, malice, anger, ego and other impediments to communal living. It is a discipline that helps him become a receptive vessel for God’s spirit to fill. These are a few of the reasons I found their monastic culture to be like that of a rare, easy-to-overlook plant whose medicinal properties are known only to a few but which could benefit many.

The motives for the monks’ kidnapping and the cause of their death remain a mystery to this day. It is not my purpose to solve it, but to tell a story of love and reconciliation amid fear and hatred.

Part One

Monks in a Muslim Land

1843–1989

1

Mourning

The nearest to the faithful are those who say We are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.

—KORAN 5:82

From a certain angle, the Basilica of Notre Dame d’Afrique looks like a giant camel on its haunches, contemplating the Aleppo pine- and eucalyptus-covered hills that form an amphitheater around the port of Algiers. Its tall neck is formed by an elegant Byzantine tower connected to a large redbrick body, surmounted by an enormous gilded cupola that for over a hundred years was a beacon for Christian Europe to come and civilize the land the Arabs called the maghreb—where the sun sets. The newcomers did their work well. Frenchmen sailing into the Bay of Algiers always experienced a sense of homecoming and breathtaking beauty. Algiers was the Nice of North Africa, France’s Mediterranean pearl, with promenades along the sea, bustling cafés, beautiful gardens, elegant women, and imperial architecture. La Grande Poste, la rue de la République, la place Delacroix provided a reassuring sense of familiarity.

In the late spring of 1996, Algiers looked like a scabrous bag lady. Once admired for the brilliant snowiness of the whitewashed Casbah rising up the Sahel Hills, La Blanche, as she was formerly known, now reeked of decay and failure, with crumbling, pockmarked buildings, ubiquitous stray cats, and putrid, garbage-filled streets. Churches that had been mosques before the French arrived were again mosques. Notre-Dame d’Afrique is one of the last citadels of a Christian presence that measures itself in hundreds in a country of 29 million Muslims.

Sunday afternoon, June 2, mourners had gathered on the steps to watch seven coffins being carried into the basilica. There were simple peasants in skullcaps, sunbaked workers in ill-fitting dress jackets, and a scattering of European men and women. Each casket was covered with a blanket of red roses, supported by four military cadets in the traditional ceremonial dress of the French fireman: white spats, gray uniform with red stripes down the pants, topped by a silver helmet of medieval proportions, polished to a mirror finish. Soldiers with Kalashnikovs patrolled the area around the cathedral and kept watch from rooftops. Killing people who came to the funerals of their victims was a favorite tactic of the terrorists.

Inside the massive rotunda, the caskets were placed next to yet one more. Monsignor Léon-Etienne Duval, many would say later, was also a casualty of the massacre. The much-loved ninety-two-year-old cardinal had struggled for fifty years for reconciliation between Europeans and Arabs. The monks were the lungs of the Church in Algeria, he liked to say. Their small community in the Atlas Mountains provided spiritual oxygen to Christians and Muslims alike. When he learned that the kidnapped monks had been executed, he told those at his bedside that he felt crucified, and died a week later.

Behind the altar stood the black Virgin—named for the color of her aged bronze skin—gazing down from on top of an azure blue-tiled tabernacle. The words PRAY FOR US AND THE MUSLIMS were painted on the cupola above her head. That day, her prayers were needed more than ever. The Trappist abbot general, Father Bernardo Olivera, was one of many churchmen who addressed the congregation, but his words were the most heartfelt.

What can a monk say about his brother monks? I know that our order was founded on our commitment to silence, work, and praise of God. But we know there are times to speak as well as times to be quiet. After fifty years of silence, our seven brothers—Christian, Luc, Christophe, Célestin, Bruno, Michel and Paul—today have become spokesmen for all the stifled voices and anonymous individuals who have given their lives for a more humane world. Our seven monks lend their voices today to me as well. They, and others like them, were living manifestations of the good news of the Gospels: a life freely given in the spirit of love is never a life lost, but one found again in Him who is Life….

They showed that we must enter into the world of others, be that other a Christian or a Muslim. If the other does not exist, there can be no love of the other. Let us learn to go beyond ourselves and to be enriched by those who are different…. Our brothers lives were the fruit of this Church in Algeria and of the many Algerians who over the years welcomed them and valued their presence. To the Church of Algeria and to you Algerians, fellow worshippers of one God, I say: A heartfelt thank you for the respect and the love you have shown to our monks."

Other homilies were given by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who had come from Paris; Archbishop Henry Teissier of Algiers; and Cardinal Francis Arinze, Pope John Paul’s personal envoy. When the service ended, senior officials of the Algerian government, members of the diplomatic corps, and hundreds of ordinary Algerians in the overflowing congregation filed past the photograph set on each monk’s coffin. Many who had known them personally embraced their pictures and whispered tearful good-byes to the smiling faces. Outside, one mourner was overheard saying that the ceremony was too grand and pompous for the men who had lived so humbly among simple peasants.

After the service, a reporter from the Parisian weekly L’Express had questions for Pierre Claverie, the outspoken square-jawed bishop of the neighboring diocese of Oran. The French government told its citizens to leave three years ago. What sense is there for the Church to stay in the face of so much danger? Are you being martyrs? he asked.

No. There are certain groups here who do not accept us, Bishop Claverie replied, but the Church is Algerian, not French, and has existed under Algerian law since 1964. The government can cancel our visas anytime it wishes, but it doesn’t because Christians are respected here even though we are a tiny community. Anyone who wants is free to leave. Those who stay are committed to the Church’s presence here. If we leave, those who want ethnic and religious purification will win. A good shepherd does not abandon his flock when wolves come.

Back in France, memorial services were being held throughout the country. Many questions hung in the air: Why were the monks killed? What kind of Islam murders godly men in God’s name? Why were Christians tending a Muslim flock?

2

Two Mohammeds

Righteousness does not consist in whether you face towards the East or the West. The righteous man is he who believes in God and the Last Day; who, though he loves it dearly, gives away his wealth to kinsfolk, to orphans, to the destitute, to the traveller in need and to beggars, and for the redemption of captives….

—KORAN 2:176

Where does the story of the monks’ death begin? With the expedition in 1830 of the Comte de Bourmont to punish the dey of Algiers for smacking the French consul with a flyswatter, which led willy-nilly to Algeria becoming part of France? Or still further back, to the seventh century, when the Arabs swept through North Africa and converted the Christian Berbers to Islam? Or more recently, in the 1880s, when French anticlericalism drove Trappist monks to seek friendlier climes in Hapsburg Slovenia, and then, fearing Communist anticlericalism fifty years later, they found a new refuge in Algeria?

But those are stories for historians, and this is a story about lovers. Some will die and others kill for their love—of God, of divine law, and justice. But is it possible to love God and hate men? Is Christian love really different from Muslim love? In the summer of 1959, a lean, earnest officer, whose thick tortoiseshell glasses gave him an owlish, pensive air, might well have been wrestling with these questions. He had more reasons for doing so than most French soldiers. Lieutenant Christian de Chergé was a seminary student whose life had been saved by a Muslim.

The events, as the dirty five-year-old war was known in France, was being won militarily but lost politically. Colonialism was out of phase. In 1956, President Eisenhower had forced Britain and France to recall the troops they had sent to intervene in the Suez crisis, which would leave the canal in Egyptian hands. Leftists in France were comparing the French army in Algeria to the Russians whose tanks had crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Yet, even in an ugly conflict that had divided French and Muslims alike, Christian de Chergé came under Algeria’s spell.

He was stationed as a staff officer in the ancient Berber city of Tiaret, famous for its Arab horses and bright ceramic designs. Located three thousand feet above sea level on the southern edge of the Massif Ouarsenis, Christian could see cathedral towers of limestone and marl watching over plains of wheat and alfalfa that descended south into the inland oceans of the Great Erg Desert. To the north of Tiaret, the serene silence of dense cedar forests on the massif had inspired an Arab poet to call the region the eye of the world.

Algeria had seduced many a Frenchman over the years. For most, it was the seduction of nature, a Wild West four times the size of Texas, full of contrasts, harsh beauty, and exotic adventure. Its immense spaces were unknown in populated Europe, and all this could be reached by a two-hour plane flight on a Douglas DC-3 from Marseilles. Its Mediterranean coast is a twin of the Côte d’Azur. Limestone mountains fall to the sea along a twisting, turning coastline full of intimate bays and indentations. The northern coastal regions get as much rainfall as Paris, and winter snows stay year-round on the mountains of Kabylia. A thousand miles to the south, great sand seas can reach temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and tires melt on asphalt roads. Christian de Chergé found everything intoxicating, especially the native Berbers and Arabs, who were uncommonly hospitable by European standards, and uncommonly devoted to prayer and pleasing God.

He had been assigned to a Section Administrative Spéciale, or SAS, one of six hundred rural pacification districts that had been created after thousands of villages were destroyed by bombing attacks. A terrorized and dislocated rural population of over 2.6 million was regrouped under French control in order to deprive and protect—to deprive the rebels of support from the population and to protect from retribution the Algerians who were either neutral or friendly to France.

Soldiers in the SAS functioned as administrators, schoolteachers, public-health workers, and engineers who built housing, hospitals, schools, and mosques. The French army organized, armed, and paid Algerians to protect the harvests, the main roads, and public utilities. The fellaghas, or fells, as the rebels were called by the soldiers, were boldest at night, when unalert guards risked having their throats slit or their manhood stuffed in their mouths.

Creating trust was the core of the military strategy. To succeed, it required showing trust and developing confidence among the people that France would remain in Algeria. If you stay and protect us, we will march with you were words SAS officiers heard often from the Muslims. Many of the Algerians had fought alongside the French in past wars. They showed their combat ribbons and shared recollections of battle-hardened comradeship, whether from World War I, World War II, or Vietnam, as they sat in the local government councils and discussed the future with French officers anxious to counter rebel propaganda.

The tracts of the revolutionary Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, constantly reminded the population that the French could not be trusted, that they had always broken their promises and always would. To persuade the Muslims otherwise, army units did not rotate assignments. Draftees served their full tour in one SAS to learn the customs of the local population and to create an atmosphere of stability.

More pastor than warrior, the SAS officer was put in a difficult position. He was supposed to make the Muslims feel French. This meant listening to their problems and making a good-faith effort to help them with tax relief, or health and security concerns. Yet, if he asked the army to compensate villagers whose sheep had been strafed by French airplanes, he would likely be ridiculed as naïve, or labeled a rebel sympathizer.

To learn of these realities, the newly arrived de Chergé had been given temporary duty commanding a platoon of thirty moghazni. These Algerian irregulars were assigned to protect him as he made the rounds, cultivating the leaders in the villages, though no self-respecting French officer could act as if he needed protection. As was his custom, Lieutenant de Chergé carried no side arm the day in August 1959 when he was taking one of his regular walks with Mohammed.

It was not Mohammed’s importance as the village policeman that drew Christian to him, but their common love of God. Christian had found in Algeria a freedom he did not experience in France. Muslims were infused with a sense of the divine. He could talk unself-consciously with them about God, unlike in France, where God talk made people uncomfortable. Christian wrote to his mother about their long soul-baring walks, and the time Mohammed rankled him when he said, You Christians don’t know how to pray. We never see French soldiers praying. You say you believe in God. How can you not pray if you believe in God? It was a question Christian had difficulty answering.

The young Frenchman and the older Muslim were lost in conversation during one of their regular rambles in the countryside, when some fells appeared from nowhere. It was an unpleasant habit of theirs, made easier by the caves and grottoes that honeycombed the limestone rocks of the massif. Mohammed put himself between Christian and the rifles aimed at his chest. He insisted that the soldier was a godly man and a friend of Muslims. The fells withdrew without harming the Frenchman. The next day, Mohammed was found with his throat slit near his home in tiny Aïn Said, where he lived with a wife and ten children.

Mohammed’s generosity of spirit contrasted with the anger that Christian found in his parish at Tiaret. The city still radiated an atmosphere of colonial insouciance. Its central square was surrounded by chalky ocre-colored arcades, lined with the government buildings of the prefecture, kiosks, and cafés, where soldiers lounged and flirted. The number of incidents, as assassinations were delicately called by the French, had been small in Tiaret, compared to other places. But the facade of normality was wearing thin as a growing sense of betrayal was taking hold of the European population.

Every morning, Christian rose joylessly to assist with the morning Mass presided over by the local curé, Ferdinand Lledo, a Catalan by birth. Lledo was full of holy wrath. He refused to read to his clergy the pastoral letters of Bishop Duval of Algiers, whose messages of justice and self-determination for all Algerians were anathema to him. He was enraged at President de Gaulle. Three departments of France, and he is simply going to give them up! he thundered at his parishioners on Sundays. He made no secret of his dislike of Arabs or Christians who showed any interest in Islam.

Father Lledo belonged to those in the clergy who believed love of country was a Christian obligation. But the country shared by the Europeans and the Muslims was not Algeria. It was France. France, they argued, had brought reason and order to what had been a nest of pirates, delivered the former Ottoman province from constant internal warfare, and brought modern engineering and medicine to alleviate disease among the indigènes.

Fighting to keep Algeria French was to fight for Christian civilization. Le Petit Bônois, published by the clergy of Bône, declared that giving up Algeria to the Marxist-dominated rebels was giving it to the Communists. The champions of Algérie Française were defending Western civilization not only from godless communism but from the equal danger of Muslim fanaticism. Abandoning Algeria will cause all traces of Christian civilization to disappear from North Africa. This is unacceptable. The church has a missionary role. And it is an outrageous lie to present Islam as a form of morality, or as a civilization that is not inferior to ours. The readers of Le Petit Bônois were reminded that hatred, pillage, and savagery were the qualities of all the primitive races.

Depressed by the spiritual confusion he felt around him, de Chergé took solace in the exceptions. Mohammed had been a light in a morally confused landscape where war had sterilized both the land and people’s hearts, he wrote years later. He changed my life by liberating my faith in spite of the complexity of daily life and showed me how to live it simply as a response to what is natural and authentic in others.

Of Mohammed, the unlettered policeman and family man, little is known. Perhaps there is more charm in not knowing much about him. Like those who wrote the Gospels, we know him only by the fruit he bore, reflected Etienne Baudry, Christian’s close friend from seminary school days, who later became the abbot of Bellefontaine Abbey. Mohammed was surely a saint. I don’t think Christian ever felt guilty about Mohammed’s sacrifice. I think he considered Mohammed’s act a gift of love, freely given. But there is no question it profoundly marked his calling.

Christian’s commanding officer in Tiaret also offered hope. Colonel André Lalande was a military hero, born in defeat. He had been among the early supporters of de Gaulle’s Free French movement, and had participated in the liberation of France in 1944. He had made a name commanding Isabelle, the last defensive stronghold at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, before surrendering to the Communist-led Vietminh in May 1954. Colonel Lalande was also a committed Christian.

Lalande shared his young lieutenant’s respect for the Muslim population. He too was impressed by their piety, as well as by the toughness and loyalty of his contingent of harkis, who were among the 250,000 Muslims serving under the French flag, a tradition of collaboration that began with Berber Zouaves who fought with the French in the 1830s. Like Christian, he was drawn to Muslims and had befriended the mufti of Tiaret. One day, Lalande invited Christian to come meet him. The mufti spoke with great politeness of the antagonism between Christianity and Islam, and confirmed Christian’s own intuition that the relations between the two religions bore the weight of accumulated centuries of mutual prejudices. For the mufti, as well as for many of us, man’s relationship with God is the seat of all our liberties and source of courage, even the courage to disobey unjust orders, he wrote years later to a wartime friend.

Torture and summary executions were forbidden within Lalande’s command. Two years before Christian began his military service in Algeria, these practices had become systematic and widespread. General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Paratrooper Division was given a blank check in January of 1957 to restore order in Algiers. Algiers had witnessed an accelerating cycle of violence and reprisal, which began with the execution in June 1956 of two rebels held in Barberousse prison, one of whom was a cripple. In response, the rebel command gave orders to attack Europeans at will. Forty-nine people were killed or wounded in three days. A mysterious Committee of Forty was then formed to retaliate by blowing up a block of Arab houses for each European killed, and so it went, until Massu’s arrival. He took on the task of pacification with distaste, calling it dirty police work.

Stories leaked back to France about the use by special units of electric shock for accelerated interrogations. To the population back home, the most upsetting accounts were those about Frenchmen—Communists and FLN sympathizers—who also had electrodes attached to their penises and earlobes or inserted in their rectums. After six months of torture, house-to-house searches, and summary executions, Massu’s men had demolished the terrorist network. The Battle of Algiers had been won at a cost of only five French lives. But along the way to victory, the army lost the public’s support.

With Lalande’s backing, de Chergé and other like-minded officers used their rank whenever possible to prevent torture and summary execution of prisoners. They were men who felt as bound to live by the demands of the Gospels as by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Named the insolent ones, they were convinced that good cannot come from evil, despite the argument that torture saved innocent lives if it prevented a bomb from exploding. They knew that torture also spawned new terrorists.

The insolent ones received strong moral support from another person who tried to live by the Gospels: Bishop Léon-Etienne Duval. Christian first met Duval at Notre-Dame d’Afrique on New Year’s Day 1960 soon after a priest had been assassinated and a particularly bloody ambush of FLN partisans had occurred. Duval’s desire to keep his heart open to all sides of the conflict made a lasting impression on Christian, as did his views on obedience. He reminded the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant that obedience was the guardian of all the virtues, provided it was rooted in faith. It was better to obey God than men. Christian obedience required intelligence and discernment; it could not be simply mechanical. It was never permitted a Christian to commit an evil act, even if commanded to do so by a superior. "True obedience assumes a harmony of thought with the one who