Thursday 20 January 2011

Reviews of Atlas Monks Film Award and ARCHIVE "A Heritage Too Big For Us"



Reviews of Atlas Monks Film award -
Of Gods and Men, Des Hommes Et Des Dieux
Glasgow
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Andy . . .
To: Donald . . .Sent: Mon, 6 December, 2010 0:34:37
Subject:  Of Gods and Men Des Hommes et des Dieux
Dear Donald
Anne Marie and I have just returned from seeing the film of Gods and Men.  What a movie. Very sensitive to the spirituality of the life within the monastery. The setting depicted the very simplistic way of life of these monks and actors in no way detracted from the sensitive nature of the build up to the kidnapping of the seven martyrs. 

The movie was very spiritual, prayerful and at parts very emotional especially after the community had decided to remain in the monastery and during the community meal one of the monks opened bottles of wine and played a recording from Swan Lake - a very moving part of the story as each member of the community realised what lay ahead of them

The sensitivity of the Cistercian way of life was very evident in the singing of the psalms, in the celebration of the Eucharist and in the Salve Regina. On looking a some of the photographs of the Atlas Martyrs it is amazing how the actors chosen to portray the monks resembled them. A film well worth seeing.

God bless
Andy

Amazon US 
5.0 out of 5 stars 
Brothers of Tibhirine,
11 Dec 2010
By  Benedict – 
Movie Review
Of Gods and Men OST (Des Hommes et des Dieux) (Audio CD)
After seeing this film I was moved by the very carefully selected music used as assist in the understanding of the spiritual, emotional and prayerful depth of the real life story of the Atlas Martyrs. The use of Latin and French text in the singing aids the listener, or viewer of the film, to become involved in the prayerful atmosphere portrayed within the Cistercian monastery. The musical climax of the movie is the background playing of Swan Lake as the community share their "Last Supper". A movie worth seeing and a soundtrack worth listening too.
 

Glasgow
---- Forwarded Message ----
From: Anne Marie . . .
To: nunraw Donald . . . .
Sent: Mon, 6 December, 2010 21:42:56
Subject: Movie review

Well, the film is more than you would expect. When it comes to monasticism I wondered if they would be able capture it.
They did it by not being afraid to be silent and to allow the
chant to do its work.  It seemed to bring you to the heart of the matter, something mysterious and wonderful. 
The relationship between the community and the village was a true bond despite religious differences and obviously a very important focus.
I won't spoil any more for you.  I was deeply moved by the film due to its simplicity.
Anne Marie
Dublin
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Noreen . . .
To: Donald. . .
Sent: Tue, 28 December, 2010 20:58:32
Subject: Re: Movie review
Jo and I managed to see the film "Of Gods and men" on the 13th Dec. at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin.  They show award winning films from other countries.  It was shown in a smallish cinema, which was full that afternoon.  A lady next to me said there were so many coming that they were going to transfer it to a larger cinema within their complex.  It was shown for a full month.  Unfortunately, it is not showing in the larger cinemas in the city.
Jo and I really enjoyed it very much and found it easy to follow the French with English dubbing.  It is rare to see such a beautiful presentation of Religious life.  Having so much background knowledge from you both was of course helpful.  It is great to read such positive reviews also.
. . .
Noreen.

Edinbugh
The film Of Gods and Men Des Hommes et des Dieux  was in Edinburgh.
Friends, who saw it, were gripped by the whole presentation.
Another friend hurried to view the last showing and regretfully could not get place even among the standing.

Leeds
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: John . . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Tue, 18 January, 2011
Subject: RE: Leeds cinema.
Dear Fr Donald,

Thank you so much for your kind email and the attachment. I was delighted to be able to print the copy of volume 1 of “A Heritage Too Big for Us” from the online version you sent. I’ve long had and interest in the Atlas Martyrs ever since reading John Kiser’s account. Their martyrdom has come to new appreciation through the film ‘Of Gods and Men’ which I saw twice in Leeds. I found it immensely moving.
Yours . . 
John


Peter from Leicester spoke to us about how riveting and impressive silence at the end of the showing. 
Other Emails and Letters came from UK and came friends in France to tell us of their pleasure to see the film on the Atlas Monks.


Our anticipation awaits the availability of the DVD. 
The Amazon provider disappointed us by supplying the CD Audio ONLY,
and then failed completely to offer the DVD Of Gods and Men, Des Hommes Et Des Dieux.
Perhaps it may find the DVD through www.amazon.fr/dvd-dvds-doccasion-imports...tv/b?


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

RESOURCE.
An Archive of the background of the seven monks of Atlas, Algeria.
For those who wish to read more on our book on-line here.


A Heritage Too Big For US

Atlas Martyrs
Vol 1. edited by
Donald McGlynn, ocso


On May 21, 1996, seven monks of the Cistercian-Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria died by assassination at the hands of terrorists: Fr. Christian de Chergé, Br. Luc Dochier, Fr. Christophe Lebreton, Br. Paul Favre-Miville, Br. Michel Fleury, Fr. Bruno Lemarchand, and Fr. Célestin Ringeard.
In my heart a single phrase was resounding: “We will not leave our dead alone, we shall come back!” (Dom Bernardo Olivera, OCSO)[1]
 From the beginning the General Chapter has been marked by the luminous witness of our brothers of Atlas who have reminded us of the meaning, the value, and the fecundity of a cenobitic life in the radical following of Christ, rooted in the local Church, responsible for a particular people, open to dialogue between religions and cultures. (Message of the General Chapter of 1996)[2]
Tibhirine was for us an icon of our vocation as Christians seeking God in the land of Algeria, that is to say in a Muslim land. . . . I think there is no other monastery in the world which has such a general relationship with the members of the local Church. Most of the priests, religious men and women, as well as the laity living permanently in the diocese, had a personal bond with the community. (Mgr. Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers)[3]
I had hardly arrived in their house, so poor and welcoming at the same time, when deep within me, coming I know not from where, I had the powerful feeling that the true monks of today were right there. And I remembered the words of Jean Baptiste Metz: that the religious life can no longer be understood away from that precariousness which tells of its openness to the eschatological. (Fr. Philippe Hémon, Tamié)[4]

Chronology

March 27–May 21 Fifty-six days of abduction.

March 27
Abduction of seven monks in their monastery of Our Lady of Atlas, Tibhirine.
March 28
Paris demands that Algeria put all its forces into operation to free them.
April 14
Pope John Paul II, in Tunisia, declares that his thoughts “turned first of all” to the seven Trappists.
April 25
The aman, the protection of the previous emir, is revoked. The GIA justify their kidnapping of the monks “still alive” and demand of President Chirac “an exchange of your prisoners for our prisoners.”
April 28
More than 2000 people pray in Notre Dame in Paris with the leaders of different religions.
April 30
The French ambassador receives an audio cassette confirming that the monks are still alive, as well as a letter laying down the conditions for negotiation.
May 1
A day of prayer is observed world-wide in Cistercian monasteries.
May 7
In Paris, Muslim leaders issue a letter to the kidnappers condemning their action as a violation of Islamic precepts.
May 9
The French authorities affirm that they will not negotiate with the GIA.
May 21
The GIA affirm: “We have cut the throats of the seven monks.”
May 27
Pentecost. Testament of Fr. Christian is opened. “Words to inspire the world” give keynote to reflections on the events.
May 30
Cardinal Léon-Étienne Duval dies at ninety-two. The remains of the seven monks are found. Abbot General Bernardo Olivera arrives in Algiers.
June 2
Cardinal Arinze preaches panegyric at Mass in Algiers for the seven monks and Cardinal Duval.
June 4
Transfer of remains by seven military ambulances to Tibhirine. Burial of the seven monks surrounded by mourning Muslim neighbors.
July 16
Reported assassination of Djamel Zitouni by other rebels.
August 1
Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran is killed by a bomb on his own doorstep.
October 5
 Fr. Jean-Pierre addresses the General Chapter on “Present Situation of Atlas.”
October 12
At Tre Fontane, Rome, Archbishop Teissier preaches at Mass of General Chapter. Pope sends message from hospital.
    

Abduction: March 26–27, 1996

Among those who lived through the events of the forced entry of the GIA terrorists (Armed Islamic Group) and the abduction of seven monks on the night of March 26–27, 1996, were three eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of what happened.[5] Fr. Jean-Pierre was the porter of the monastery, who observed some of the activities of that night. Fr. Amadeus’s room was close to the medical supplies, which diverted attention from his locked door. The third witness was one of twelve members of the Ribât group staying in the guest quarters. They were fortunate to remain undetected. Each became aware of what was happening in his own way. It is remarkable that so much could have been going on, within the same walls, without everyone’s being alerted. A clear, composite picture of events emerges from the independent accounts of these witnesses.
At the midday hour of March 26, 1996, the community Mass was celebrated as usual. As the brothers heard the Gospel of the day, they could not have anticipated the manner in which the words from John 8:21–30, “I am going away and you will seek me,” were to be realized tragically in seven of them that very night.
At 5:30 p.m., the end of the working day, the time people stopped coming to the dispensary, Fr. Jean-Pierre locked up for the night. The Security Services had been insisting on early closing for some time. At 1:15 a.m., Fr. Jean-Pierre, sleeping in the porter’s room next to the entrance, was awakened by the sound of voices. Remaining concealed, he made out two or three persons speaking in Arabic and immediately realized it could only be the “brothers from the mountain” who had somehow gained access to the cloister. A man with a tommy-gun joined the others. From another angle Jean-Pierre saw a turbaned figure, also with a tommy-gun slung across his shoulder, making an entrance near Br. Luc’s room; conversation was low and there was no violence, so he did not realize the gravity of the situation. He had not heard the doorbell and therefore assumed that Fr. Christian had forestalled him and had taken matters in hand just as he had done on that all too acutely remembered forced entry of Christmas Eve, 1993. He had no idea that some twenty terrorists were deployed. He felt it wiser not to show himself and prayed anxiously for them to go away. The thought of death and martyrdom had often occurred to him but not the possibility of being taken hostage. He heard someone ask “Who is the chief?” and a reply, “That’s him, the chief. You must do what he tells you,” followed by comings and goings in the entrance hall. Then silence, and the sound of the street door being closed. He thought Christian had sent the intruders away. He went to go to the bathroom before returning to bed. The lights had been turned off; everything seemed in order, except for some clothing scattered about. He wondered, “Did they ask for some clothing that they did not like and threw there on their way out?” Everything else seemed normal. There was nothing more to be done. Jean-Pierre did not know that the lights had been turned off by Fr. Amadeus.
Fr. Amadeus had been awakened by noise that made him think of Br. Luc looking for medicines, except that Luc would not be so rough. He could then hear voices but not Luc’s familiar asthmatic cough. Someone tried his door. It was locked and the intruders seemed to turn their attention back to the medicine cartons. Amadeus used his torch to check his watch. It was 1:15 a.m. He dressed silently. The figures were too close to the door for him to see much through the keyhole as they continued to ransack the medicine stores. After activities had stopped, he eased his door open. The lights were on. Everything was in disarray. In the adjoining room of Br. Luc, medicines and books were on the floor. The new little radio had gone. Expecting the worst, he rushed to Fr. Christian’s office, where Christian had been sleeping recently in order to be near those at the entrance. There also everything was turned upside down, the electric typewriter and camera had disappeared, and the telephone had been removed. Of Fr. Christian and Br. Luc there was no sign.
“What about the guests?” It was at this point that he quickly extinguished the lights and hurried to find out about the twelve members of the Ribât who were in the guest rooms near the community bedrooms. The doors of the monks’ rooms all lay open, lights on, everything scattered about and the brothers gone. In great fear for the guests he continued along the passage through the enclosure door to the guest quarters. There everything was quiet. The night-lights were on and the bedroom doors closed. He knocked on the first door. He found the occupant wide awake and waiting, having been roused earlier by another guest in the group. The two listened in alarm. They thought they heard Célestin’s voice among others and supposed he might have taken ill and that the brothers wanted to move him downstairs, or might have wanted to take him to the hospital, but that was impossible in the night. Boldly, one of the two half-opened the monks’ enclosure door. They knew immediately that the terrorists had come again. When at last there was silence and the hallway was empty, they still could not risk making themselves conspicuous or try to escape by the external stairs, fearing that armed men were still around. They decided to return to their rooms.
The intruders made a quick departure. Did they think they had their full catch of hostages after they had rounded up seven of the monks? They would not have known that two monks, Br. Paul and Fr. Bruno, had arrived just that previous evening, another indication of a premeditated kidnapping. Police findings showed that taxis had been requisitioned at the village of Ain Elrais. These were later found abandoned. After that the kidnappers seem to have used mules to cover their trek into hiding in the mountains.
 As the guest in the room nearest the monks’ enclosure waited in his bed with thoughts of death, listening for further sounds, Fr. Amadeus appeared with a torch saying, “Are you there? The monastery is empty. There isn’t a single father left!” Together they began their search. The guest noticed that Br. Paul’s room was littered with the wrappings of gifts and sweets he had just brought back for Easter. He noticed one box left untouched because, he guessed, the chocolates contained alcohol. He later placed these in the refrigerator to await the return of the brothers. A large cheese was likewise left lying near the statue of Our Lady, because it had the large Savoy Cross on the Tamié wrapping. In the kitchen, refectory, and cloister they found little disturbed, except that the telephone line had been cut. They went toward the porter’s room. “Jean-Pierre, it’s Amadeus, are you there?” To their great relief Jean-Pierre, fully dressed, opened the door with his usual peaceful smile. They told him, “We are the only ones here, all the others have been taken away.”
The first thing to do was to contact the Security Services, but the telephone lines had been cut. It was later found that the wires had been severed fifteen kilometers away, another mark of a well-planned raid. They went to the nearest house with a phone, only to discover that they could not make a call. The family was terribly frightened, and Fr. Jean-Pierre stayed awhile to comfort and encourage them.
By 3:00 a.m. nothing more could be done, and it was decided to rest until the office of Vigils. Amadeus said he had not finished the rosary he had begun while the others were out. Together they completed the prayer. “Amadeus radiated an extraordinary peace,” the guest noticed. As arranged, they began Vigils at 5:15, three guests feeling honored to hold the place in choir of the abducted brothers, as best they could. It was thus in the chapel that the other Ribât members, nine sisters, found them.
At dawn there was an unusual silence. The call of the muezzin did not mingle with the sound of the monastery bell. It seemed that the villagers already knew of the attack and were fearful. The twenty or so faithful who normally came to the mosque, part of the monastery building, for dawn prayer did not come. Fr. Jean-Pierre and one of the guests drove off through the mist and arrived at the police station at Médéa at 7:15 a.m. The commandant was on the point of setting off on a planned operation but gave them his full attention. He immediately contacted his superiors and obtained authorization to inform Archbishop Teissier, the French Ambassador, and the Algerian Press Service. All was conducted in Arabic and with surprising alacrity.
Ten members of the Ribât group departed for Algiers in two cars. One had to wait for other transport. Another decided to stay with Jean-Pierre and Amadeus that night. The group reassembled at the Diocesan Center, “in communion with our wounded Church and at the same time conscious that, as Sr. Jean-Marie said, our brothers were living or were already in the light of God, and it was for us to watch with them. This is why we felt it right to continue our programme.”[6]
During the day a contingent of police and then a detachment of soldiers came to investigate. When they began to enter the cloister they were stopped by the guest who asked them to stay at the entrance, using the words of Fr. Christian on an earlier occasion: “This is a place of prayer and of peace. We do not enter it with arms.” In each case the armed men respected this situation. In the evening Jean-Pierre and Amadeus accepted the military instructions and were guests at a hotel in Médéa for that night. The Ribât guest accompanied them and admired how Jean-Pierre and Amadeus, in their rough jackets and woolen bonnets, spoke with their usual simplicity and peacefulness to the hotel manager, the head of the prefecture, the chief of police, and everyone who welcomed them and wanted to fuss over them.[7]

History of Cistercian Monks (Trappists) in Algeria 1843–1904, 1934–97[8]

The fate of the Cistercian monks of Our Lady of Atlas at Tibhirine, like the many Trappists who completed their special religious calling in Algeria before them, is marked by its Cistercian character. The present Constitutions of the Order, approved as recently as 1990, express the exceptional nature of certain communities living in non-Christian environments: “In God’s providence monasteries are holy places not only for those who are of the household of the faith, but for all persons of good will” (ST 30.B). North Africa has always been exceptional, because it has held little hope of local recruitment, and more especially because it has provided the need for a Christian presence of a purely spiritual character in a non-Christian milieu.
The lives of the young monks who died in the early years of Staouëli[9] are remembered not for anything they had to do with the forces of political power of French colonization, which differed so much from those of the conflict of Algerian Independence, but for the uncompromising pursuit of their own monastic vocation of silence, prayer, and labor.
The commendable achievements attributed to the monks for a number of good reasons—their contributions in agriculture, education, evangelism, and medicine—may be a credit to them but are extrinsic to their real aim. These achievements demonstrate both the reality of the social, religious, and political conditions and how little these impinge upon the life of the anonymous monk following the simple Cistercian vocation of austerity and prayer. The lot of the Atlas monks in 1996 was apparently at the mercy of external circumstances, as was that of their predecessors at Staouëli in the previous century, and at the same time distinctive in the primacy of its spiritual goal and faithfulness to that goal alone.    

The first Cistercian monastery in Algeria was founded at Staouëli in 1843 by Aiguebelle with strong backing from the French government. Within five months of their arriving in North Africa, one young monk died. Four others, also in their prime, followed, and in the year 1848 alone ten monks died of malaria. These young men came from Aiguebelle and were to be joined over the years by monks from Bellefontaine, whose interest in Algeria down to three of the martyrs of 1996 has never diminished, and from Melleray and Timadeuc. At the height of its activity there were some 100 monks, assisted by 120 workers, laboring on the development of Staouëli. Their vocation was to live a religious ideal of remarkable zeal and austerity in a spirit of separation from the world. They were, however, not entirely unaware of the political system that could patronize them for other motives. The chronicler wryly comments: “Thus the monastery, its model farm, and its industries served both the spiritual and the material interests of the new country, organized by sword and plough by Marshal Bugeaud and his soldiers, but educated by Cross and plough by Abbot Francis-Regis and his monks.”[10]
The spiritual and material success of Staouëli were such that, in the spirit of the times, Napoleon III came in May 1865 to visit the monks there and brought Charles de Foucauld to stay in 1896 and 1901. There were few signs to give warning of the next sudden twist in the monastery’s being hostage to secular powers. The doubtful support of a liberal non-religious regime was followed by the period of fierce anti-clericalism that led to the dispersal of thousands of religious in France. The fear of expulsion, the possibility of confiscation, and the extreme political and economic problems of the motherhouse, Aiguebelle, brought the sudden decision to sell the flourishing monastery of Staouëli.
The same turmoil that brought the exile of so many religious caused the Abbey of Dombes to establish a refuge in Slovenia, which became Our Lady of Deliverance (1881). In 1934, suffering under a very different menace from the Yugoslavian government, the abbot of Deliverance sent a nucleus of five monks to Algeria. This house was to have been a refuge, but it came too late to save the monks of Deliverance from the Nazis and the Communists. The small nucleus of monks sent from Our Lady of Deliverance was to become, after initial difficulties, the community Our Lady of Atlas.[11] Thus within a very short period of cataclysmic political changes in Europe, the monks, following unswervingly their Cistercian monastic life of seclusion, had returned to Algeria. In the small cemetery at Staouëli were the burial places of the monks who had run the course of their monastic vocation on Algerian soil, but now the Cistercians had no claim to that property.
After trying unsuccessfully in two other places, they found the location at Tib-Hirine, ‘the gardens’, a nineteenth-century English colonial farm. Seven kilometers south of Médéa and at 1100 meters altitude, it commands a magnificent view. In 1938, after four years of hard work, the small group of five pioneers had doubled in number. Some monks, including some survivors from Staouëli, came from Aiguebelle to strengthen the community. During the 1939 war, the community grew to twenty persons. Several monks were mobilized but the monastery was safe. The immediate post-war years saw expansion in numbers and in buildings. The community reached the number of thirty-five persons, including a living link with the past in the person of Fr. Francis d’Assise, who had been a novice at Staouëli and had returned to lay life when the monastery closed in 1904. This progress peaked in the year 1952 when Our Lady of Atlas was raised to the full status of an abbey.
At this point a new epoch in the story of Algeria was about to commence. During the war of independence beginning in 1954, the marabouts blancs (‘white monks’) enjoyed unique freedom from the conflict. The monastery seemed to be a shelter from the troubles of the external world. Thus in 1956 a colony of refugee Muslim children was placed in an encampment in the shadow of the abbey. Sensing the same protection, families from the neighboring massif of Tammesguida, fleeing from the fighting, came to settle two kilometers along the road and thus created the small village of Tibhirine.
Only in one instance did the monks find themselves in the full flow of events when, in 1959, two of the community, Fr. Matthew and Br. Luc, were kidnapped by the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale). When Br. Luc was identified as the toubib, the doctor, who gave his services free, the two hostages were quickly released. Although Br. Luc soon left for France for treatment for his asthmatic condition, the monastery was not disturbed during his absence.
Br. Luc did not return to Atlas until 1964, to find the community in a very different situation in the new conditions of Algerian independence. Islam had become the state religion. In fact, the community, with much negotiating by Archbishop Duval of Algiers, was only tolerated by the authorities. The severe restrictions included never exceeding the number of twelve persons. As for the farming unit, out of 374 hectares, 360 hectares were to be given up to the state for redistribution to the local people. Only ten of the remaining fourteen could be cultivated. A further plot was given up for the site of a local school to save long journeys by the children.
With only a handful of monks remaining at Atlas and so many obstacles to its future, it seemed ironic that the coup de grace was to come from Rome. On November 13, 1963, Abbot General Dom Gabriel Sortais decided on its closure. The question had been debated at the General Chapter, and unless reinforcements could be found, the abbot general was authorized to proceed with its closure. Archbishop Duval, in Rome for Vatican Council II, persisted in defending the small community. Dom Gabriel Sortais died on the evening of his decision. A new abbot of Aiguebelle, Dom Jean-de-la-Croix, went to Algeria with the idea of closing the monastery but was persuaded by Cardinal Duval to keep it open. Volunteers were found, and so in 1964 eight new members, four from Aiguebelle, and four from Timadeuc (including Fr. Jean-Pierre Schumacher) came to the assistance of Our Lady of Atlas. From 1963 to 1984 it lived modestly like the Church in Algeria, or rather it survived with an ever greater awareness that nothing was ordinary for a community of prayer on this morsel of land at the foot of the Atlas mountains. In March 1984, a change of status from abbey to simple priory corresponded better to reality and at the same time safeguarded their autonomy. The election of Fr. Christian de Chergé in 1984 was the first time in twenty-two years that the community had voted for its own superior. A new phase in the life of the community had begun.

To Remain or Not to Remain

At the beginning of the year 1992, the interruption of the electoral process led Algeria to a volatile situation, with the suppression of the FIS as a political party, the imprisonment of its leaders, and, later, the formation of several armed groups, in particular the GIA, who demanded that all foreigners leave the country by December 1, 1993.
On December 14, 1993, twelve Croatian Catholics known to the monks had their throats cut at Tamesguida, a few kilometers from the monastery. A week later, on Christmas Eve, the monastery of Atlas was visited by six armed brothers from the mountain around 7:15 p.m. There was no bloodshed, but the visit was a turning point in the consciousness of the monks.
The leader of the group, Emir Sayah Attiya, was known as a terrorist of redoubtable violence. He was responsible for the death of the twelve Croatian Catholics near the monastery and, according to the security forces, had cut the throats of 145 persons. His exchange with Fr. Christian was extraordinary. Fr. Christian, appealing to the Koran, told him that the monastery was a place of prayer where no arms had ever entered; he requested that their conversation take place outside the monastery. Attiya agreed to this. He presented to the monks, whom he recognized as being religious like himself and his group of Islamists, three demands of cooperation. To each one Christian replied that it was not possible. Each time the armed Emir said, “You have no choice,” but each time Christian replied, “Yes, we have a choice.” Attiya left saying that he would send his emissaries with a password. As he was leaving Christian said: “You have come here armed, just as we are prepar­ing to celebrate Christmas, the feast of the Prince of Peace.” Attiya replied, “I am sorry, I did not know.”
The miracle was not only that Sayah Attiya left that evening without cutting the throats of the monks or brutalizing them but that he did not return and did not send his emissaries. When about two months later he was seriously wounded in a confrontation with the security forces, he suffered for nine days in the mountain district nearby before dying, but he did not send for the monastery doctor, which was one of the demands to which Christian had said that he could not respond.
At a meeting of the community on the day after that Christmas, the majority of the brothers were in favor of an immediate departure. On December 27, Archbishop Teissier visited and explained the effect that a sudden departure of the monks would have on all Christians in the diocese. He suggested a plan for a more gradual withdrawal. After further discussions in January, the monks decided on a plan that included the possibility of remaining on “if there is no obstacle.”[12]
Eleven religious of the diocese of Algiers were assassinated in five different attacks during 1994–1995 (a Marist Brother, a Sister of the Assumption, two Spanish Augustinian Sisters, four White Fathers, two Sisters of Notre Dame des Apôtres, and one Little Sister of the Sacred Heart of Charles de Foucauld).[13] Each time the monks of Tibhirine asked themselves the same question: should they leave or should they stay.
The monks never bought their safety by any concession whatever, and they never condoned any form of violence; but for them every person, even a terrorist, was a human person worthy of understanding. For this reason, while prepared for the worst, they felt the possibility of martyrdom as a living tension of charity working both ways. Each time they decided to stay, it was a decision taken after prayer and dialogue, a decision that was lucid, courageous, serene, and unanimous. Not one of them desired martyrdom. Fr. Christian, speaking to a group of lay people shortly before his abduction, said that such a desire would be a sin since it would be to desire that a “terrorist brother” should sin against the divine commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

In the Hands of the Brothers from the Mountain

The abduction the seven monks of Atlas by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) lasted almost two months. Secrecy still veils the terrorists’ actions in the assassinations. The history of events so far put together depends on the information available almost exclusively from one side. In the absence of evidence of the actual execution, which is obviously not forthcoming from those actually implicated, we can account only for the abduction on March 26 and the eventual recovery of the remains on May 30.[14] Only after the actual slaughter of the seven monks was it made public that an audiotape existed of voices of the hostage monks, about whom there had been no information for weeks, showing that they were still alive on April 27. On the tape, the terrorists threatened that they would slit the throats of the monks if the French authorities refused to negotiate. The tape was temporarily kept secret. It was not even revealed to the Algerian security forces. And so twenty-one days later, a message from the same source declared, “They cut off the discussion which had begun—and we cut the monks’ throats.”
By definition martyrs speak for themselves; they have earned that special title of “witnessor martyr by giving their very lives. These followers of Christ had to articulate for themselves their spirit of love and unflinching faith in the face of direct threats, in the close proximity of assassins, and in sight of repeated killings. One can learn why the monks felt called to remain faithful to their vocation in solidarity with their neighbors by understanding something about the personalities and backgrounds of these seven: Christian de Chergé, Luc Dochier, Christophe Lebreton, Paul Favre-Miville, Michel Fleury, Célestin Ringeard, and Bruno Lemarchand.

Biographical Notes[15]

• Fr. Christian (Christian de Chergé),

a priest fifty-nine years old, was prior of the monastery. He entered Atlas in 1969 and made his novitiate at the abbey of Aiguebelle.
Father Christian’s first experience of Algeria was growing up in that country as a child for three years while the 1939 war raged in Europe. One of his brothers tells that at that time Christian was impressed by the way in which Muslims prayed to God: “Our mother never ceased saying to him that they prayed to the same God as he did.” Early impressions and love for Algeria were revived and reinforced much later during twenty-seven months of national service in the middle of the Algerian war of independence. It was during this period that his love of Algeria became rooted and the rest of his life marked by an experience he had.[16] He was posted in a village of the Special Administrative Section. He had made friends with a young Algerian rural policeman. One evening they were walking together when they were attacked by some nationalists of the FLN. The young Algerian interposed his body to protect Christian, and they got away. The young Algerian had saved his life, but two days later his body was found with his throat cut. Christian never forgot this incident.[17]
Christian, born in 1937, was the son of a distinguished French general. In this family of the old French nobility he and his seven brothers and sisters were formed in the active practice of their religion. At an early age he became aware of his vocation, and at twenty he entered the Séminaire des Carmes in Paris. “From the beginning,” recounts a contemporary and friend, Claude Bressolette, “one was impressed by his natural distinction and reserve. Little by little, behind the smile and the gentle regard, one discerned what I can only call an elegance of heart.”[18] He recalls that friendship was the subject of their dissertations, and that Christian’s had great spiritual depth.
This gift of making friends characterized his relations within his extended family and led to ever widening contacts and friendships within the Cistercian Order. He was invited to share his experiences with the monks and nuns directing novices in France. He spoke every Sunday by phone to his friend, Dom Étienne Baudry of Bellefontaine, during those last critical months. He had a special affinity with the community of Latroun (Israel/Jordan) because of their common Arab-Muslim context.[19] In 1984 he attended the General Chapter in Holyoke US, and he made new friends among American monks, for he spoke English in addition to French and some Arabic. He wrote to Abbot John Eudes Bamberger of Genesee for his feastday: “This is a good occasion for a big thank you for all the attention and kindness you showed me during the General Chapter. I have often said since then that thanks to you and through you I have discovered another image of ‘America’ and the echo of the same authenticity in a very different economic and cultural context.”[20] He had been elected prior of Tibhirine earlier that year. His regular correspondence with the abbot general shows his great feeling for the Cistercian Order. His letters to Dom Bernardo chronicle the deepening community consensus and commitment in the years leading to the monks’ martyrdom.
Christian was a contemporary of Vatican II. He assimilated the theological insights of the great dogmatic and pastoral constitutions. He was a man with a sense of the Church, and after ordination in 1964 he served as chaplain to the school of the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre. He had good relations with Cardinal Marty. There was affection, humor, and simplicity in their exchanges. When Fr. Christian felt the time had come and that he had satisfied his obligations to the archdiocese of Paris, he obtained from Cardinal Marty approval to follow his long-cherished calling to Algeria. Visits to the Benedictine abbey in Morocco[21] since 1961 had helped him to acquire a better understanding of and a better rapport with the land and its people. In his desire to deepen his dialogue he had been studying Arabic and taking every opportunity to meet people with known sympathy for the country of his choice.
Isolated in Islamic territory, the monastery at Tibhirine depended on monks’ coming from other communities. The case of Fr. Christian was different. His first choice was to be accepted for Our Lady of Atlas, although it was necessary to make his monastic novitiate at Aiguebelle. Besides monastic formation he received encouragement to study the Arabic language and culture for two years with the White Fathers in Rome before he finally settled into the unique role in Islamic-Christian dialogue that came to distinguish his monastery. He actively supported and shared in the Ribât association of dialogue and friendship between the two faith communities. After a lapse of such meetings, Christian invited the group to meet again at Tibhirine in March 1996. For Christian this dialogue was no passing interest. It became the perspective of a wide and deep love. “It is a sort of ‘microclimate,’” he said in an address to the General Chapter of 1993, “which frees our faith from all human respect and false reserve. Moreover, there are those values that animate Islam and which we also ordinarily expect to find among monks.” Menaced more than ever by being invaded by an armed band on Christmas Eve 1993, Christian felt impelled to compose a letter to the terrorist chief. In it he referred to those common religious values and his one desire to remain in the country of his love:
Our state as monks binds us to God’s choice for us, which is prayer and the simple life, manual work, hospitality, and sharing with everyone, especially the poor. . . . We are very conscious of having received much from Algeria and through her, from this Islam which prompts believers to emulate good actions until the day of the Lord. If, some day, Algerians judge that we are not wanted, we shall respect their desire and leave with very much regret. I know that we would continue to love them all, together, and you among them.
His own preferential choice was to reside there always, with the daily prayer on his lips, “Lord, disarm me and disarm them.” Fr. Mounios, parish priest at Médéa when Christian entered Tibhirine, vividly recalls: “He was a man with a fine bearing and of remarkable intelligence. Thanks to his finesse he quickly adapted himself to the local people.”[22]
By his bedside after his abduction there was found the book of Sheik Khaled Bentounès, Le Soufisme, Coeur de Islam. Br. Paul had just brought the book the evening before. It would have been Christian’s last reading, in his quest to the end for unity. The book reflects the spirit of the friends of Islam and those who continue in the hope “that we would make our journey together towards God and towards man. This is the urgent concern God has given to us today, and we all pray for it.”[23]

• Brother Luc (Paul Dochier), 

   medical doctor, eighty-two years old. He entered the Abbey of Aiguebelle in 1941 and left for Algeria in 1946.
On the eve of his abduction, the intensity of the threat of violence was too great even for Luc’s ever-jovial nature. With utter clarity he wrote to a friend, “We can only exist as men by willingly becoming the image of Love, as manifested in Christ, who, though innocent, chose to suffer the fate of the unjust.” This seriousness and clarity of intent are all the more significant in one whose sense of humor remained to the end, overcoming painful attacks of asthma and the fatigue of uninterrupted attendance on the sick in the monastery dispensary. He could gently make fun of misplaced pretensions. His own ideal that nothing is more important than the love of God was exercised with a cheerful spirit. In his words, he was “an oldie, used but not disabused, worn out but not withered.” To think of him is to think of a happy person. He had prepared his own burial liturgy to include a tape of an Edith Piaf song with the words “No, nothing—but nothing—no, I regret nothing.”
The long life of Br. Luc presents a beautiful, consistent picture set within a clear cut-frame of war, service to others, love of God. Born in 1914 at Bourg-de-Peage, in the Drôme region of France, Luc Dochier found his first vocation quickly in medicine. From his early years at the faculty of medicine in Lyons, he kept many friends who later sent him medicines that he needed for his dispensary at Tibhirine. Army service took him as a military doctor to North Africa in 1939. His return to France after this first military experience brought a growing sense of the futility of war and the desire to care for the victims of the conflict. He therefore volunteered to care for the prisoners of war held in German camps. His offer was made with the condition that the father of a large family should be set free. The Germans agreed. Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling, but what disturbed the young doctor most was the treatment of Russian prisoners. He took care of them for months. One of those he came to befriend in this way drew his portrait with a piece of charcoal, a souvenir now all the more cherished by his family.
At his liberation Luc understood that he wanted to save lives and thus to serve God. He decided to join the Cistercians. After some years in formation at the Abbey of Aiguebelle, he left for Tibhirine in 1946. His love story with Algeria and its poor people was to continue for fifty years without interruption except for breaks in 1959 and 1992 when his acute asthmatic condition brought him back to France for treatment. After that, he knew that his condition could only deteriorate, but he insisted on returning to Médéa. He said, “I will retire definitively when health forces me” and obstinately pushed himself to the limits, sometimes seeing up to seventy patients a day in the small dispensary. These people were proud of him and his clinic, “the best managed within 100 kilometers,” they would say. He had won a respect and affection that amounted to a veritable personality cult. He was universally referred to as the toubib, the doctor.
Not many have had the uncommon destiny of being kidnapped twice in a lifetime. Luc was abducted with Fr. Matthew in 1959 when the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale) wanted hostages to bargain for the Imam of a Mosque at Médéa who was imprisoned. They spent a week on forced night-marches, until one day a rebel, just arrived, recognized the toubib who had tended him when he was seriously ill: “Are you crazy, keeping this person? This is the doctor who cares for our people freely.” The two exhausted monks were set free on the main road near Médéa and picked up by an army convoy. Luc, as an asthmatic, returned to France to recover, and Matthew had a break at home in Italy. The toubib did not return until 1964, but the monastery was not disturbed any more by the ALN.[24]
His seniority among the monks and his practical apostolate to the sick gave a distinctive style to the extensive influence of “this powerfully good, this truly strong character,” as his friend describes him. United with his brothers in the witness of martyrdom, Br. Luc exemplifies the richness and variety of character and embodiment of charity possible in the witness of Christian community.
“There is no true love of God without an unreserved acceptance of death.”[25]

• Fr. Christophe (Christophe Lebreton),

   forty-five years old, a priest, was subprior and novice master. He entered the Abbey of Tamié in 1974 and left for Algeria in 1987.
The forced entry into the monastery by the armed guerrilla band at Christmas 1993 was a turning point in his spiritual journey. Fr. Christophe wrote: “This Christmas was not like others. It was charged with significance. Like Mary we keep all these things that have happened. We continue to ask ourselves what has been initiated in our hearts. Like a sword the significance has pierced us.”
Christophe is too easily and not very profoundly identified as a “student of ’68.” As a schoolboy of eighteen, he had his transistor going all day in May 1968 to reports of the student agitators demonstrating in Paris. His regret at not being able to join them was only one link in a restless quest. At the age of twelve, news of the pending death of his grandmother from cancer made him feel rebellious and wish to take her place. He was an ardent person, enthusiastic in whatever he took up. He was the seventh child in a family of twelve children. A precocious religious vocation ended with departure from the junior seminary and, as he was always ardent in his views, total separation from religion. Marxism had its dramatic attraction until, in the middle of a demonstration, he realized in one stroke the futility of his course and how he was being politically manipulated. He was left with nothing to believe in until a chance encounter with the Emmaus movement and Abbé Pierre. Recovering religious commitment he also discovered love through relationship with a woman.
This new awareness could have led him to marriage, the value of which he never denied, but the challenge of love led him to understand that the love deep in his heart was from God and led himto the Church as the place where this love, his vocation, could express itself totally.[26]
Christophe discovered Algeria and the monastery of Our Lady of Atlas at the beginning of 1970 during his national service. For his National Service he had taken the option for serving the assistance scheme for Algeria, teaching students and helping with handicapped children. A priest friend brought him to Tibhirine on several occasions. The extreme poverty of the neighboring people made an indelible impression. He was sure he would return. In 1974 at the age of twenty-four, after tentative studies for a degree in law, his decision was made. He entered the Monastery of Tamié (Savoy). During his novitiate, aspirations to radical poverty revived the attraction of Tibhirine, and it was there that he made his first vows. But for a young monk the facilities for formation were sparse indeed. The community was small and elderly. Resources in personnel for teaching were better at Tamié, and the presence of contemporary young monks provided a better challenge for formation. Christophe spent the next six years at Tamié studying and using his woodworking skills at manual labor. During this time his monastic experience was affirmed and deepened. Later, when he was called to assist the sister Abbey of Dombes in the capacity of guestmaster, Br. Christophe was described as “a monk of thirty-eight years, happy in this altruistic life, collected, convivial, entirely turned to God.”[27]
In 1987 an encounter with Fr. Christian led him to return to Algeria. He brought with him a talent for animating people and bringing them together. In 1990 he introduced his Algerian friends to twenty-eight members of his family who attended his ordination to the priesthood, and lasting friendships were made. His last visit home to Toussaure, Drôme, was in 1995 for the funeral of his father. To the suggestion of leaving Algeria, he replied: “Why should I have the choice to flee, while the Algerians do not? They are the victims, not us.”
The Islamic-Christian interreligious dialogue entered more and more into his prayer, his writing, and his poetry. He felt that he was only beginning to understand:
Not having the linguistic and religious knowledge necessary to enter into dialogue with Islam, I feel called simply to listen. And it is God who is heard in his Word who is sent, who tells me to listen, to welcome all this strange, different reality. To the point of feeling myself responsible: may the Spirit lead it towards the full truth. And if we can make this journey together, so much the better! And making this journey we can speak and be silent.[28]

• Br. Paul (Paul Favre-Miville),

    fifty-seven years of age. He entered the Abbey of Tamié in 1984 and left for Algeria in 1989.
Only a few days before the kidnapping, Br Paul[29] was at Tamié and spoke to the community at length and with affection about each of the brothers in Atlas. On March 26 he flew from Lyon and arrived that same evening in Atlas. He had little time for unpacking his suitcase before he was caught up in the train of events. Ever the practical monk, his baggage had included a supply of shovels and copper beach shoots for Tibhirine, which means ‘garden’.
He had been home to visit his ailing mother. Before parting with the parish priest, his friend Père Baud, referring to the risks “down there” he said: “I go back to Tibhirine, come what may.” In the presence of others he concealed his fear with an air of black comedy. When his family was astonished at the number of shovels he had bought, he quipped: “It is for digging our graves better!”
The Favre-Miville family originated in Bonvaux, a Chablais village. Paul came into the world at the outbreak of the World War II. His father was the village blacksmith, and in due course Paul was to set himself up as the only plumber of Bonvaux, extending his work to the Valley of Abondance. He was the ideal plumber handyman, who could be called upon and relied upon for any job. He loved his work, and he sang all the time. He attended to all the demands on him up to the moment he finally, at the age of forty-five, entered the monastery of Tamié.
But this ordinary workman had a wealth of character and experience. He was drawn into the municipal council and served as assistant mayor and as councilor at different times and he equally fulfilled the role of fireman. He seldom, if ever, spoke of his experience in the national service as an officer in the paratroops in Algeria, but obviously he was also someone who had been smitten with love for that country.
It was not unusual to see Paul in the course of his activities frequently make spontaneous visits to the church. Père Baud, the curé of Abondance, got to know him and had him do readings at Mass, and he got the impression of a man of deep spiritual depth of character. A good mixer, he could share a drink and a joke, but he had a marked discretion. He was reticent about himself, but it came as no surprise to his three sisters and those who knew him when at last, in 1984, life for him changed completely. At forty-five, the celibate plumber decided to exchange his tools and work dungarees for the monk’s habit. He was accepted at Tamié. Four years later the prior of Atlas, Fr. Christian, came to the Abbey of Tamié. His talk and his personality impressed Br. Paul. Together with Br. Christophe, he rediscovered his old attachment to Algeria and the attraction of “a more radical commitment to live at the level of people who have to struggle.” Together they set out for Atlas.
His skills found full scope at Tibhirine. “He had golden hands,” someone said of him. He found water for the crops, which the monks shared with the villagers in a co-operative, and set up his own unique irrigation system. Bringing back shoots of copper beach on his last trip, he never lost hope of seeing them flourish in Médéa. His hope in small seeds firmly planted in the earth reflects his own supernatural hope in the “Spirit working deep down in the hearts of men.” He asked:
What will remain in a few months of the Church in Algeria, of its visibility, of its structures, of the persons of whom it is made up? Little, very little, probably. However, I believe that the Good News is sown, the grain is germinating. . . . The Spirit is at work, he works deep down in the hearts of men. Let us be willing that he be able to work in us by prayer and loving presence to all our brothers.[30]

• Bellefontaine and Algeria. Three volunteers: Michel, Bruno, Célestin.

The abbey of Bellefontaine in southwest France had a considerable part in assisting the monastery of Staouëli, which preceded Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. That tradition of active interest once again surfaced in the remarkable calling of three of the brothers in 1984 to go to the Atlas community, whose membership had been falling. Abbot Étienne Baudry was novice-master and well remembers the surprising response of three of his brothers to this need:
     First, I have to explain that the three brothers felt the same appeal to go to Atlas exactly at the same time: at the end of March 1984. At the end of February, a diocesan priest had spoken in chapter about Algeria, where he wanted to go for one year. At the beginning of March (the 6th, I think) the son of the rebel saved by Fr. Célestin called him on the phone! And about the 28th of March a priest coming from Constantine, a diocese of Algeria, also spoke in chapter and explained the situation of Atlas. The next week, as novice-master, I received Br. Michel, the first, on Tuesday, Br. Célestin, the second, on Wednesday, and Fr. Bruno, the third, on Friday (I still remember it as if it were yesterday!). And all of them told me they felt the same calling—smoothly for Michel, enthusiastically for Célestin, firmly for Bruno. Of course they had not spoken about it among themselves. But their situations were different, because Br. Michel and Bruno were temporary professed (the first had entered in 1980, the second in 1981), while Br. Célestin had entered only in 1983 and was in the first year of his novitiate. So we spoke about the calling of Br. Michel and Bruno at that time, but not of Célestin.
     Both Michel and Bruno left for Atlas at the end of August 1984 for two years. In July 1985 Dom Emmanuel, coming from Benin, stopped at Atlas, and it was decided that Br. Michel would remain while Fr. Bruno would come back to Bellefontaine. He came back to Bellefontaine on August 12, 1985, and stayed until March 1989.
     At the feast of the Ascension, we began to speak of the calling of Fr. Célestin, and he left for Atlas in September 1986.[31]

• Br. Michel (Michel Fleury),

   fifty-two years of age. He entered the Abbey of Bellefontaine in 1980 and left for Algeria in 1984.
Br. Michel was perhaps the most unexpected person of the three monks of Bellefontaine who quite independently came to their own decision to respond to the appeal for Algeria. Judging by his extremely self-effacing character and his simplicity, this would seem to have been a surprisingly bold initiative for Br. Michel. It was, however, consistent with his hidden dedicated life going back to his childhood. For Michel the hour had struck for him to enter fully into his vocation, “To live in the midst of the poor as a present-day Trappist.” He was reaching the goal toward which his years with the Brothers of Prado had been drawing him.
Born in a modest family in Pontchâteau (Loire Atlantique), he was in his childhood enfolded by religion, with family prayers three times a day. “A Sunday without Mass was not a Sunday,” his sister recalled. He always seemed to find a sense of God’s presence in the land. At seventeen he tried his vocation at the monastery of La Flocellière, in the Vendée. He took up his professional life as a machine-worker in Marseilles and at twenty-seven joined the Brothers of Prado. With them he found the humble kind of life to which he aspired. The best way to support and defend the workers, according to him, was to live among them. He lived in shabby lodgings with some mates in the working quarter of La Cabucelle. Never forward, always deep, equable, Br Michel shone by his simplicity and gentleness. His sister remarked: “It was impossible to dispute with him.” He had worked in factories in Lyon and Marseilles before directing his steps to Bellefontaine in 1980, where he heard the call to Algeria.
At Tibhirine he applied his usual dedication to work in the kitchen and in the house, always calm even when overworked and tired. He spoke little and observed of himself: “Out of the monastery I am like a fish out of water.” His last visit to France was in October 1995. He feared delay by strikes in getting back to Atlas. He excused his haste by quoting a young Algerian he had overheard in the garden saying of the monks: “We are the birds, you are the branch.”
In his own way he prepared his family for the worst eventuality. On a postcard he had written: “Through our windows there is only smoke and fire in the hills and mountains. Until when? To depart? That is a somewhat ambiguous word. If something happens to us, I wish to be in solidarity with the people here. Keep all that I tell you in your prayers. Without a doubt, the hardest to live is yet to come.” At the bottom of his letters he always wrote: Inch ’Allah, ‘if God wills it’, the Muslim commendation to God.
In the abduction, remarkably, Br. Michel took his monastic cowl with him. This garment is worn at formal liturgy and on solemn occasions. Br. Michel’s cowl was found on the road to Médéa. He died on his fifty-second birthday. His commitment to God and to the Algerian people was tenacious:
If something happens to us (I hope it doesn’t), we want to experience it here, in solidarity with all the Algerian men and women who have already paid with their lives, simply in solidarity with all those unknown, innocent people. . . . It seems to me that He who is helping us to hold fast today is the One who has called us. I remain in deep wonder at this.[32]

• Fr. Bruno (Christian Lemarchand),

    priest, sixty-six years of age, superior of the annex house in Morocco. He entered the Abbey of Bellefontaine in 1981 and left for Algeria in 1984 (for a year), and again in 1989.
Fr. Bruno’s love of Algeria went back to his childhood. His early years were colonial. He was the son of an army officer, originally from St. Maixent, who was accompanied by his family to Indochina and to Algeria. One of his sisters was buried in Algeria. His own career was very different and home-bound in the center of France. In 1956, at age twenty-six, he was ordained priest. After years as professor of French he became rector of the College of St. Charles de Thouars (1965–1980). Under his direction the college acquired a solid reputation, but he refused to make the College of St. Charles a school for the privileged. He arranged free scholarships for deprived families. He was known as a gentle director, just and never severe. He had a certain reserve, which sometimes gave the mistaken impression that he was distant. It was an open secret among teachers and students that he had a yen for the monastic life. He had a yen for solitude and would make long retreats at the Benedictine monastery of St. Martin de Ligugé. It was to the Cistercian Abbey of Bellefontaine that he decided to go in 1980. The long-dormant attachment to Algeria was reawakened in 1984 when he heard an appeal for religious and priests to go there. He expressed his desire to go to Tibhirine to the novice-master, and the abbot agreed to his request. He left for Atlas in August 1984, and came back to Bellefontane in July 1985. He left again for Atlas in March 1989 and made his solemn profession there the following year. In October 1990 he was asked to go to the annex house of Fès in Morocco and some time later to lead the four monks living the Cistercian vocation in that small community.
It was somewhat by chance that he was at Tibhirine on the March 26, 1996, and was taken captive. It was his first visit in five years. He had come to participate in a vote for the office of prior. He suffered death in the mountains of Atlas with the brethren among whom he had pronounced his monastic vows six years previously.
He was a man gentle and just in his actions, composed and reflective in his outlook:
Here I am before you, O my God. . . . Here I am, rich in misery and poverty, and in indescribable weakness; here I am before You who are nothing but Love and Mercy. Before you, but solely by your grace, I am here whole and entire, with all my soul, and with all my will. (Bruno, March 21, 1990)

• Fr. Célestin (Célestin Ringeard),

    priest, sixty-two years of age. He entered the Abbey of Bellefontaine in 1983 and left for Algeria in 1986.
As Fr. Célestin descended from the plane in Algiers, the past came to meet him. Waiting at the foot of the gangway was an Algerian whose life he had saved during the war in Algeria. In 1957, serving in the medical corps, he had cared for a wounded rebel of the ALN and prevented his execution. That terrible memory marked a lasting attachment to Algeria and now, as he returned as a Trappist monk, it was a very moving moment for Célestin as he was embraced by this man.
At sixty-two his presence here was astonishing. He was beginning a new vocation after a long priestly apostolate that would have filled and distinguished the lifetime of any priest. For twenty years, Fr. Célestin had carried on an intense city apostolate. He had resigned the comfortable parish of St. Dominique, Nantes, in order to reach out to unemployed youth, alcoholics, prostitutes, and drug addicts. His little blue 2CV car was a familiar sight in the poor quarters, and the kindness of the man, who opened the doors of his flat to the needy and would invite them to spend Christmas there, en famille, was proverbial. He had seen it all, and yet this man remained the most sensitive of persons.
He seemed destined to experience life in its most agonizing situations. At fifty, this caring priest witnessed the suicide of a young homosexual, who threw himself from a window after calling for help. From that moment his thoughts turned more and more to the monastic life until, to the amazement of acquaintances, he entered the silent contemplative life at Bellefontaine. What astonished his friends was how such a temperament could feel at home in a monastery, “considering his need to talk and his urge for relating to people.” He tended to speak vividly of his vocation: “Someone had called him to the Order.” In the autumn of 1986 there was an appeal for priests to go to Algeria. Célestin did not hesitate. It was for him, according to a friend, “an interior thunderbolt.” He asked to go to Tibhirine and was surprised to find himself joined in this desire by Michel and Bruno of the same community.
At Our Lady of Atlas Célestin was able to enhance the liturgy of the small community as organist and choir master. The tension from the brothers of the mountain caused him, perhaps, anxiety but, like his brother monks, he embraced them in prayer and in inner peace. He would turn to others, and in Br. Luc he found a certain complementarity, a contrast of personalities—on the one hand the lifelong contemplative accustomed to tending the bodily ailments of poor people, on the other the apostolic pastor, long experienced in ministering to suffering souls. Br. Luc, the old monk, an avid reader, would share his latest interests with Célestin, who was not much inclined to reading.
The intrusion of guerrillas into the monastery at Christmas 1993 had traumatic consequences for Célestin. His heart condition became acute, and he had to undergo a multiple coronary artery bypass operation. He had only returned to Tibhirine after a long convalescence at Bellefontaine when he was abducted.
The simplicity and harmony of his life is expressed in a letter he wrote in January 1996: “In carrying out my daily duties (and this helps me each day), this morning I sang two little sentences: ‘O God, you are hope on the faces of all living,’ and ‘Wonder of your grace! You entrust to men the secrets of the Father.’”

Ribât and the Monks: Origins of a Spiritual Association


   Claude Rault, one of the founding members of Ribât, was asked to explain the relationship between Ribât and the community of Atlas. In a written statement he described this relationship as a vital, deep, and enduring link that can only be understood from the origin and development of the association.[33].
The name Ribât es-Salêm means ‘Link of Peace’. The group took this title when it first met in 1979 in the shadow, as it were, of the monastery. The first meeting took place significantly on the feast of the Annunciation in the spring of that year. It was the initiative of some Christian men and women, well rooted in the Church, who felt the need to form links with the spiritual tradition of Islam, not only with the written tradition but also with the living tradition.
Claude Rault was then based at Touggourt and often met with Fr. Christian. They discussed the subject more and more deeply. Out of these and other discussions came the idea of a group of like-minded Christians having the opportunity to meet. Their desires seemed to hinge on two main objectives:
1) The better understanding of Islam as a spiritual tradition capable of helping their own spiritual life and growth,
 2) The encounter with Islamic men and women and their spiritual journey.
The question was where to find a favorable place in the Church willing to welcome such a group and open to this common concern. Dom John de la Croix, then prior at Atlas, had followed this development with interest. He thought it important and said he felt it should be “grafted onto the monastic trunk.” When asked, the community agreed to give hospitality and support in this spirit. From then on practically all the meetings of Ribât were held at the monastery. This is how the very strong bond between them came about.
The Ribât, therefore, was not an initiative of the monastery but of some committed Christian men and women who, like Fr. Christian, were open to meeting and dialogue with Islam. Year by year, meeting by meeting, they became closer to the monks; the community always kept the Ribât’s concern very much in their prayers and gave them a sense of support in their efforts in the milieu of their Islamic neighbors. The group enjoyed the kind of welcome that they felt was a sacred hospitality. Three of the monks participated fully in the meetings of the Ribât: Christian, Michel, and Christophe.
Twelve of the members were present at the monastery on that tragic night of March 26–27. They were undetected in the guest quarters of the monastery. In the strength of the legacy of their kidnapped brothers, they transferred their meeting to Algiers and completed the session. The three who had stayed that night at Atlas arrived before the meeting ended. The report given to the other members emphasized the serenity of the two monks, the fidelity of their neighbors, and the promptness of the authorities. Archbishop Teissier also came and spoke of his contacts with the administrative and military authorities.
The following meeting took the title of Ribât in Diaspora and was held at La Thoberte, May 18–19, 1996.[34] Attendance was the highest ever, an encouraging sign that the intuitive vision of Christian would inspire others to continue. While still waiting for news of the hostages, Claude suggested it was a time “to live the Eucharist more intensely. The hostages could not celebrate it, but they are Eucharist themselves by their whole being.” The meeting ended with news of the formation of a new group of Ribât in Tunis.
The strong bond that grew between Ribât and the monks continues. After the assassinations, the solidarity established with the martyred brothers seems to give added strength and conviction to the search for reconciliation and friendship, communion and peace.

The Press

As days turned to weeks and weeks to over a month, anxiety grew for the fate of the seven monks, and prayer continued. Many articles appeared in the religious and secular press, which, in the absence of any news about the hostages,[35] told the remarkable story of the monks of Atlas.[36] Press versions of the story were fairly accurate, largely because of the rapidity with which Dom Armand Veilleux, the Cistercian procurator general, circulated the authentic details of the Atlas community and first-hand accounts of his visits to Tibhirine early in January 1996 and immediately after the kidnapping.[37] There was great sympathy expressed by the media generally, as the abbots and abbesses of France had occasion to acknowledge with gratitude.
At the same time, reservations had to be expressed regarding certain comments questioning the motives of the monks.[38] A second question debated, legitimately enough, considered the precise nature of martyrdom, dying in witness to the faith.[39]
Following the impact on the media of Fr. Christian’s Testament, opened at Pentecost, May 26th, there was a new level of understanding in reporting and comment. Fr. Christian’s Testament—“words to inspire the world,” as one editorial put it—has even generated a literature of its own in a continuing flow of interpretations, reflections, and inspirational articles.[40] Fr. Christian and Fr. Christophe have left other writings, but the Testament will be the key to understanding them.
The martyrdom of the Atlas monks has profoundly touched the life of the Cistercian Order. Their influence on the monks and nuns of the Order has been considerable and leads to further reflection and writing on the inspiration and relevance of the monastic vocation[41] and the life of religious today.[42]
The Pope, John Paul II, frequently remembered the captives in his public addresses of prayer and urgent appeals for their release. He spoke of them during his journey to Tunisia in April, as he recalled the saints of North Africa. In his Angelus message on Sunday, March 31, he prayed fervently for their release:
     In this season of the Lord’s Passion, we are thinking and praying for the seven monks of the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria, who are still in the hands of their kidnappers.
     I appeal to the sense of human brotherhood and ask for the immediate release of those religious who have chosen to remain as witnesses to the Absolute, among a Muslim people with whom they have built up bonds of friendship and mutual respect over the years.
     May they return to their monastery safe and sound, and take their place again among their Algerian friends! May God inspire all the citizens of that nation to embark without delay on the way of true peace, for which the people so long!
This prayer and those of so many others were not to be answered by the release of the monks.

After the Assassinations

Stunned incomprehension, shocked incredulity, and great anguish of heart united men and women of every faith when the announcement was made on May 21 that these brothers of all men and women had been cruelly beheaded.[43] In France millions shed tears as they watched, on television, Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, extinguish the seven candles that had been burning in Notre Dame Cathedral as symbols of hope, candles that had been brought from Our Lady of Atlas and lit movingly by seven monks of Bellefontaine to begin that long vigil of prayer.[44] In a cry from the heart the cardinal implored:
I beg all who can to continue to pray for peace in Algeria. With the killing of these lives before us, I wish to say, in the name of God, no one may kill. We must respect life and forgive. I beg that you banish hatred. . . . We have only one Creator. He wills that men live and that they love one another.[45]
In a communiqué from the French Foreign Ministry, Hervé de Charette said that the death of the seven monks engendered “a reaction of stupefaction, of indignation, and of condemnation.” He appealed to French nationals to leave Algeria.[46]
On Pentecost Sunday, for the first time in many years, bells were tolled in every church throughout the country in honor of the brothers who had given their lives. But a light shone on that Pentecost Sunday into the terrible darkness. Into the gloom of mourning and hardening of hearts, relief and consolation came from the very source of sorrow. On that day the Testament of Fr. Christian was made known. This was a letter of “last will and testament” to dear ones, which he had composed precisely for the eventuality of violent death. He had written this message three years before in anticipation. He had thought of all those he loved and also of those who would kill him. He transfigured everything in forgiveness and love. In a few lines he not only accepted death in terms of Christian faith but went on to new depths of Christian love and transforming forgiveness.
Fr. Christian’s intuition and vision burst on the scene and gave light to the consciousness of mourning millions. It was immediately grasped by ordinary people. To commentators of the press, radio, and television, Christian’s words brought a luminous key to understand the destiny of the martyrs of Atlas.
The Testament, in almost poetic form, ends with the lines:
     And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing.                          Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU to you, in whom I see the face of God.
     And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. AMEN. (In sha ’Allah).

“Seismic fault-line” —Bishop Claverie

 On Thursday August 1, 1996, Bishop Pierre Claverie, Bishop of Oran, was in Algiers where he met the French foreign minister, Hervé de Charette, who was going to Tibhirine to visit the graves of the murdered monks. The Bishop had predicted that there would be some spectacular attack to counter the positive effects of Charette’s mission of peace. As the Bishop arrived home that evening, a bomb exploded outside his residence, and he and his Muslim driver were killed.
In his address to a Scout rally at Fanjeaux, France, shortly before he was killed, he said, “I believe that not being close enough to the cross of its Lord is fatal to the Church.”[47] Elsewhere he described the situation in Algeria as being at the “seismic fault-line” of spiritual breakdown. He voiced his concern about growing government corruption and the consequent poverty of the poor.[48] He was, therefore, a more obvious target than the monks whose faith and whose fate of death he shared.
These tragic deaths have triggered an instinctive search for the guilty ones in the need to attribute blame. In the spirit of Fr. Christian’s powerful testament of forgiveness, it might be better if the guilty ones were never identified or if the monks’ deaths were the “accident” of an armed attack on their captors. By their abduction the monks were plunged into a cauldron of opposing forces, and the story of their fate is swallowed up in a sea of conflicting reports. The mystery remains as to who actually carried out the kidnapping. The kidnappers had accents that did not seem to be local but rather those of eastern Algeria.[49] Why was there a thirty days silence before a declaration was put out in the name of Djamel Zitouni? A year later, many questions still remain shrouded in secrecy. Initially much credence was given to the attribution of responsibility for the killings to the terrorist leader, Zitouni.[50]
A photograph of Zitouni was issued by the secret services which could only have been a photo-fit, since no genuine photograph existed. It is possible that the report of the importance of Zitouni and of his terrorist exploits was likewise a fabrication. Western experts of the GIA and of the Islamic movement in general have since come to the view that the last message of the GIA announcing the assassinations and most probably also the first one, with the seal of the GIA and the signature of Zitouni, were fakes. Some are convinced that Djamel Zitouni was dead well before the abduction of the monks.
In contrast to the official story leading to a clear-cut conclusion, the truth is still more obscured by the anarchic situation surrounding the captivity and death of the monks, a situation that continues to envelop the “disappearance” of hundreds of innocent civilians. A report published by Amnesty International, January 1997, states that the level of violence has not abated:
Killings and violations are carried out in the name of the “anti-terrorist fight” by government forces and in the name of “holy war” by some armed groups who define themselves as “Islamic.” . . . Since the beginning of 1992 not a single allegation of torture, “disappearance” or extrajuridical execution has been the subject of a thorough, independent and public investigation. [Campaign Journal for AI, 81 (1997): 12]
In this tense conflict of armed opposition groups, factions within the army, and local militia groups set up for security but with little degree of accountability, the killing of the monks could have been carried out by any of these groups or by accident in some encounter. The existence of peace-loving monks amid these uncontrolled forces of violence, rapine, and murder in an ethnic, cultural, religious, and political struggle brought them to experience the seismic breakdown described by Bishop Claverie, before he too became a victim of unidentified killers. He wrote:
The Church accomplishes its calling and its mission when it is present where there is a tearing apart of humanity, that very crucifixion of the flesh. Jesus himself died suspended between heaven and earth, as it were, with arms outstretched so as to gather together the children of God, scattered as they are by sin, isolated indeed and set up one against the other, indeed against God himself. Jesus placed himself at the epicenter of this tragic breakdown caused by sin. For in Algeria, we are on the very seismic fault-lines that mark the world: Islam-the East, North-South, rich-poor. This is the right place for us to be, for it is here that the Light of the Resurrection can shine forth.[51]
Bishop Claverie, a native Algerian, was perhaps Fr. Christian’s ideal in his complete love of his country and its people, in his intuitiveness, and in the gift of expression that he, as a Dominican, knew how to use to the full in his writing and pastoral work.[52] A man of dialogue between cultures and religions, he had earned the nickname of “Bishop of the Muslims.” Even after the beheading of the seven monks, he refused to leave. He felt that his staying in Algeria was a sign to the Muslims that their country had not been abandoned to collapse into chaos. This conviction led him to declare that he and other Catholics were ready to give their lives alongside the Algerians to counteract barbarian violence.
Pierre Claverie was the nineteenth priest or religious to be killed in three years. He explained to the young people at Fanjeaux, in June 1996, the motivation that he shared with the monks and all these witnesses to the faith:
Since the start of the Algerian drama we have often been asked, what are you doing here? Why do you stay? Because of Jesus—there is no other reason. It is not a matter of an interest to protect, of maintaining an influence. . . . Because of Jesus—for it is he who suffers the violence which spares nobody, crucified once again in the flesh of thousands of innocent people. It is essential for the Christian to be present where there is suffering and dereliction.[53]–55

Let the voice of our martyrs resound

In the June 27, 1996, London Universe, editor Joe Kelly wrote:
Words to Inspire the World . . . . His words are an exceptional testament in exceptional circumstances, but we might all do well to follow their message, wherever and whatever we are. In a faith that so passionately supports the sanctity of life, many of us quietly struggle to understand the glory of martyrdom, what the Church calls “the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith.” Countless volumes have been devoted to the subject, but few words will have been so eloquent, or so readily understood, as Fr. de Chergé’s honest paragraphs. His letter was a gesture of love to his family, penned undoubtedly to comfort them in an inevitable time of great distress and spiritual confusion; but within days of his death it has already winged its way around the world. The murder of missionaries might well be thought of as a relic of colonial history, but the fact is that the Church is now more than ever on the front-line of conflict. Ask any missionary and they will tell you that that is where the Church has to be, whatever the consequences; but if anyone asks how death can be stared in the face with such humility, just refer them to “Fr. Christian’s letter.”[54]
In response to this editorial column, Kelly received hundreds of letters and phone calls from readers saying how moved and inspired they had been by Fr. Christian’s Testament.
Not everyone saw it in this light. The London Tablet said that the monks had been killed because they were French, not because they were Catholic. Dom John Moakler, abbot of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, took issue with the editor, pointing out that the GIA’s own words stated “it was because they were Christian religious.”[55] In France a letter expressing an Algerian attitude to the question became the subject of debate in the Le Nouvel Observateur.[56] It said: “If Br. Christian had had more charity than heroism, he would have known it was better to avoid the menaces of assassination than by accepting assassination to plunge us into implacable hatred.” Bishop H. Simon of Clermont referred to this reasoning as “the fallacy of the argument of the highest charity,” pointing out the absurdity.[57] Applied to France it would mean that all Muslims should leave the country in order not to provoke the hatred of other citizens.
The matter will be debated. It is worth noting that two promoters of causes for canonization have been closely touched by the deaths of the monks of Atlas. Abbé Joseph Chone, Promoter of the Causes of Saints, Paris, was a fellow seminarian with Fr. Christian. Dom Armand Veilleux, OCSO, holds this office for Cistercian causes. The canonical question can become technical and abstract.
Not so the moving “Tribute From an Arab Brother” written by Fr. Louis Wehbé of Latroun Abbey in Israel. In this personal response there is deep perception and understanding of how the giving of their lives by these monks might be considered martyrdom in the strict sense used in the canonical process:
     Are you and your brothers martyrs? I have not the least doubt about it. It is a martyrdom that conforms most closely to that of Christ; it is a very pure form of martyrdom that distinguishes itself from the attitude attributed to the early fathers who, placing themselves on the side of the pure, appeared to be arrogant and disdainful of their judges. Neither you nor your brothers wished for martyrdom, because you did not wish that the Algerians and Muslims, whom you loved so dearly, should pay the price of the grace of your martyrdom by offending God and by bringing on themselves the condemnation of murderers. You and your brothers had long ago given your lives. In July, 1994, you wrote to a little girl: “If something happens to us, believe that the love of God for this people allowed this to happen, and what would have been taken away thus, even violently, was given.”                    For me it is beyond doubt that you and your brothers died for Christ and the Christian faith. You did not look for death or want to be heroes. You wanted to remain true to your gift of self and to your witness, “to our religious vocation including the possibility of ‘martyrdom’” (Letter of July 9, 1995). Your attitude could not be clearer or allow for any confusion. On December 28, 1993, you yourself, Christian, wrote to Sayah Attian, Emir of the GIA (Armed Islamic Group): “Our life as monks (ruhbân) binds us to God’s will for us, which is a life of prayer and simplicity, manual labor, hospitality and sharing with all, especially the poorest. These reasons for living are a free choice for each one of us. They engage us until death. I do not believe that it would be the will of God that you should be the instrument of that death.”          What did the GIA accuse you of to conclude that you deserved death? The Emir (Abou Abdel Rahman Amin), the one who claimed responsibility for your abduction, accused you of the following in his Communiqué No. 43, dated April 18, 1996: the monks have “never stopped inviting Muslims to become Christian, displaying their slogans and symbols and solemnly celebrating their feasts.” He declares that “the monks who live amongst the faithful can legitimately be killed”; “they live amongst the people and lead them away from the divine path by inciting them to embrace Christianity.” “It is also lawful to inflict upon them what was inflicted upon the infidels of old when they are war prisoners: murder, slavery, or exchanging them for Muslim prisoners.”    It is, therefore, clear that the GIA and its leader, Abou Abdel Rahmân Amîn, killed you in the name of Islam and because of your Christian religion. The majority of the Muslim world will certainly condemn these murders and will not recognize itself in the narrow Islam of the GIA. It is evident that you died because you were Christians and monks. In accordance with their principles, the GIA, in its Communiqué No. 44, dated May 21, 1996, coldly justified the assassinations committed, stating: They [the French] “have declared that they would not enter into dialogue or negotiate with the Armed Islamic Group [GIA]. They interrupted what they had started, and we have cut the throats of seven monks, faithful to our commitment. Praised be God. And this was carried out this morning.”                                                Christ foretold this: And indeed the hour is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is doing a holy duty for God” (Jn 16:2).[58]
In his “Faithful Reading of the Events,” Dom Bernardo focused on what was clear. He wrote:
Let not diplomacy, politics or a non-transcendental view of these events come to deprive us of the voice of our martyrs and silence the clamor of their cry of love and of faith. From the martyrdom of spiritual combat to the martyrdom of blood poured out, it is the same cry that calls to forgiveness and love of one’s enemies. Life is stronger than death: love has the last word![59]
The acts of the martyrs were communicated with great rapidity among early Christians. The remarkable speed of communication in the case of the Atlas martyrs is demonstrating some of the same response regardless of precise labels of martyrdom. There is little sign of slowing in the flood of publications. The first book appeared within a month, Sept Vies Pour Dieu et l’Algérie.[60] This work was the remarkable achievement of Bruno Chenu, who had effectively covered the situation of the monks of Atlas for La Croix. With help from the monasteries of Bellefontaine and Tamié, he assembled the most recent texts from Atlas tracing its spiritual journey. Before the end of October a second and quite different kind of book was published. Les Martyrs de Tibhirine[61] by Mireille Duteil is a triumph of research and analysis of events and affairs. The author is an expert on Arab affairs, but the history, lives, and deaths of the monks are shown in the fullest light. It is an invaluable record animated by an obvious esteem for the martyrs of Tibhirine.

Christian’s Testament—Authorized Version & Variants

On June 2, 1996, Vatican Radio broadcast an improved English translation of Fr. Christian’s Testament. The original French text was first published by La Croix on May 28, 1996. From that first reproduction in La Croix, based on the manuscript, one can trace divergent translations into English. There are two very different versions, which are significant for the interpretation of Fr. Christian’s words.
The first English translation was issued by the secretariat of the Order, Rome, May 30, 1996.
A second translation appeared in the Boston Pilot and The Universe (possibly syndicated to other papers). This version was obviously based on the French text in La Croix on May 28, which made the first line, “Quand un A-DIEU s’envisagé,” into a large headline so that it did not appear to be part of the text and was thus omitted in the English.
The French did, however, keep the word “islamisme,” which in the first English translation was mistakenly transcribed as “idealism.” It also kept the invocation, In sha’Allah, ‘If God wills’, which was missing in the English.
The most difficult phrase to translate, even for French speakers, was “en-visagé de toi.” The French original reads: “Oui, pour toi aussi je le veux ce MERCI, et cet ‘A-DIEU’ en-visagé de toi.”
The first version of the English had: “Yes, for you, too, I say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU–to commend you to the God in whose face I see yours.” The syndicated press version had: “Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, and this ‘adieu’ which is of your planning.” Finally, the authorized version reads: “Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this ‘ADIEU’ to you, in whom I see the face of God.”
Other English versions appeared, one on the Internet, another in the Religious Life Review (Dublin). In England the BBC radio asked to obtain the exclusive transmission rights of the improved translation, which had been read on Vatican Radio and published in The Tablet (London).
It was felt that an authorized version should be copyrighted by the Order. After consultation between several English- and French-speaking communities, an acceptable English translation was approved. This version has been copyrighted in the interest of the integrity of the text, not to restrict its distribution.[62] It is reproduced below in the Appendix.

Testament of Fr. Christian – Commentary

 “In praise of a hyphen” is the title of an editorial by Fr. Ciarán O’Sabhaois.[63] He wrote: “One of the most extraordinary things in the Testament is his insertion of a hyphen into the word ‘Adieu’ extending its meaning from ‘Good-bye’ to the full richness of its literal ‘To God’.”
This Testament of Fr. Christian was born out of the peril from assassins over a prolonged period. Two dates are appended to the letter: December 1, 1993, and January 1, 1994. They correspond to two stages of the text. The first corresponds to the apprehension that followed the GIA’s ultimatum of “death to all foreigners.” The second expresses a reaction to and horror at the indifference of the French press to the massacre of twelve Croatian workers near the monastery. (“I would like them to be able to associate this death with the many other deaths which were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity”).[64]
The opening words “When an A-Dieu is envisaged” create, with the closing “A-Dieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours,” a perspective on the whole experience of a life already given to God (à Dieu). In a simple gaze towards the face of God, Fr. Christian binds together the several loves of his life. Death itself and the seeming enemy are seen in the face of God.
As he bids his A-Dieu to his loved ones, he also enfolds his killers in deep understanding of the relationship between all human beings “envisaged” before God.
His opening A-Dieu means both to God and goodbye.[65] In facing death the words A-Dieu have their full meaning in a life committed from the beginning in love (“Remember, my life was given to God and to the country”), a life continuing in fidelity to the children of Islam seen “in the gaze of the Father as he sees them,” and concluding with his final thank you and A-Dieu commending his killer to God.
The concluding “A-Dieu en-visagé de toi” is almost impossible to translate —the love of enemies to this extent is so unusual. “God is taking his definitive face at the end of my life, and now that I am in front of him, not only can I see how he looks at my Muslim Brothers, but His face has your face, my Brother, who murdered me!”
Only a few months previously, Fr. Christian spoke to the General Chapter of 1993 and expressed the same thought about the face of God. He said, “We see that the Muslim tradition also knows how to pass on to others the desire to see God, as the Koran says, ‘All will pass away but for God’s face’.”[66]
In the end the face of God! The Islamic tradition seeking the face of God is one of “the true strands of the Gospel” that Christian found to be a positive challenge even in his monastic vocation. At Tibhirine, bell and muezzin sounded out together from the same enclosure, bidding all to pray. Many of the values of Islam are associated with monks: ritual prayer, prayer of the heart, fasting, vigils, a sense of the praise of God and of God’s forgiveness, a naked faith in the glory of the wholly Other and in the communion of saints. Fr. Christian listed all these and went further than others in integrating Muslim spiritual experience while remaining deeply and totally Christian. In this knowledge and friendship (“in the certain knowledge of what I have received from it”), it pained him to see that religion misinterpreted and misapplied by its supposed followers: “I know also the caricature of Islam which a certain kind of islamism encourages.” Sadly he perceived that fanaticism (“a certain kind of islamism”) encourages” the distortion (“caricature”) of true Islam, not that Islam encourages fanaticism.
Fr. Christian’s words are an exceptional testament in exceptional circumstances. Even more significant is the fact that his experience is that of a community and not only of one person—an experience that extended to close union with the Muslim community around the monastery.
The martyrdom of seven monks will cause a lull in that daily contact, but their sacrifice may inspire even greater understanding in the Muslim world and lead to spiritual growth between Islam and Christians. In the words of Pope John Paul:
Today many consecrated persons are looking for and finding—in such contacts—the traces of God’s presence, a presence guiding all humanity toward the discernment of the signs of His will. Such a search proves advantageous for consecrated persons themselves: the values discovered can in fact prompt them to deepen their own understanding of the Christian practice of contemplation, community sharing, hospitality, respect for persons.[67]

Last Lament

On Friday, May 30, Mgr. Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers, learned of the death of Cardinal Léon-Étienne Duval, and a few minutes later of the discovery of the mutilated remains of the seven monks of Atlas. This news was awaiting Dom Bernardo Olivera, abbot general, and Dom Armand Veilleux, procurator general, who were flying from Rome not knowing what to expect or whether or not there would be any remains of their brothers at the requiem Mass. Archbishop Teissier was able to inform them about the remains and suggest that the funeral Mass could be celebrated for both the monks and their life-long champion in the basilica of Our Lady of Africa, his cathedral.
Cardinal Duval had helped the community of Atlas to survive many crises and had grown very close to them and to the monks of Tamié in his native Savoy. He had taken the Cistercians to heart. He confided to his niece, a few days before he died, “The death of the monks has crucified me.” He was the great figure of the Church in Algeria. Three weeks previously, he had refused, out of fidelity to the country he loved, to return to France for an operation. He was ninety-two. He had once written, “When I came to Algeria, it was with the intention of remaining here until I died.”
The question of the place of burial for the monks was discussed. The abbot of Bellefontaine, who was in touch with the relatives, phoned to say that the families agreed with the monastic family in wanting them to rest at Our Lady of Atlas. Some hesitation was expressed because of the security risks, but the authorities respected these wishes.
Of more immediate concern to Dom Bernardo were the difficulties about seeing the mortal remains and identifying the monks. The presumed obstacles were again quickly removed by sympathetic higher authorities. On Friday, May 31, the Cistercians were taken to the morgue of the military hospital for this privileged but painful last fraternal service. Fr. Amadeus remained outside praying while only Dom Bernardo and Dom Armand were shown the coffins. The few words Dom Bernardo could permit himself afterwards were, “In the face of what we saw next, we couldn’t help thinking of the Precursor of Jesus, Saint John the Baptist.” It was all over in twenty minutes.
Solemn requiem Mass was celebrated in the great shrine of Our Lady of Africa on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, and accompanying Masses were celebrated in cathedrals, monasteries, and churches around the world. Cardinal Arinze was there to represent the Holy Father.[68] The eight coffins were in the sanctuary; on each had been placed a large wreath of flowers and a good-sized photo. In the large and palpably grieving gathering of dignitaries of Church and State, of ordinary people of all faiths, Dom Bernardo spoke movingly but simply, offering “the testimony of one monk to his brother monks”:
     The hidden voice of the monks has remained silently in the cloister of Our Lady of Atlas for more than fifty years. This same voice was changed during the course of the last two months into a cry of love which has resounded in the heart of millions of men and women believers and men and women of good will. Our seven brothers of Tibhirine, Christian, Luc, Christophe, Paul, Michel, Bruno, and Célestin are today transformed into spokesmen for so many stifled voices and unknown persons who have given life for a more humane world. Our seven monks lend their voice to me, too, today. . .
     The witness of the monks, like that of every believing Christian, can only be understood as a prolongation of the witness of Christ himself...
     Our brother monks are a ripe fruit of this Church which is living its Pasch in Algeria. Our brother monks are also a ripe fruit of this people of Algeria which received and esteemed their life during so many years of presence and communion.[69]
The abbot general ended with moving words of gratitude to the Algerian people for the respect and love with which they had surrounded the monks. After the Mass there were emotional expressions of that same love, and sympathy, as people approached, tears in their eyes, to greet the monks who had been spared and their brothers from Rome. One security guard of the military hospital, a Muslim, shook the hand of Dom Bernardo very hard, saying, “The monks are our brothers too.” Many asked for forgiveness for what had happened.
The earthly passage of Christian, Luc, Christophe, Paul, Michel, Bruno, and Célestin ended in the extreme isolation, simplicity, and poverty of their burial at the now deserted monastery of Our Lady of Atlas. The scene of that last lament, so pitiful and remote, cannot fail to be seen against the background of the enduring grandeur of the Atlas mountains and in the light of more eternal hills.
The events have had an unusual chronicler in the person of Dom Bernardo Olivera, OCSO. His journal, extending to four long letters, is not merely personal. He records events made sacred by the memory of the martyrs. He writes with the brothers and sisters of the Order in mind. It is remarkable to have this first-hand account of something of which the Order cannot yet see the consequences. The burial, that strange but silent ending to a cruel and equally silent drama, is best described from Dom Bernardo’s chronicle.
The burial took place on Tuesday, June 4, 1996, at Our Lady of Atlas.[70] In the words of Dom Bernardo:
     A day humid and gray: all nature seemed to be weeping for sorrow. A great display of police and military when we got to Médéa and still more at the monastery. . . . The coffins were carried by about thirty military cadets, all with great respect and dignity. Behind the closed doors and in the most complete intimacy, I preside over an extremely simple liturgy. . . .
     Again the cadets entered to take the mortal remains and carry them to the community cemetery. The seven graves had been prepared. . . .
     I said the last prayer and they began to lower the coffins into the graves. It was already 13:15. Monsignor cast the first shovelful of earth into the grave of Michel and I into that of Christophe: a group of neighbors continued the task. . . . At that very moment the sun appeared.
     The coffins disappeared into the earth and we disappeared into the arms, the kisses, and the condolences of innumerable neighbors of the monastery, who at the same time thanked us for having buried the monks here. At 13:45 it was all over. . . . I made a rapid visit round the monastery. With the idea of sending it to Madame Lebreton, I took a Christ in olive wood which hung on the wall of the library.
In my heart a single phrase was resounding: “We will not leave our dead alone, we shall come back!”[71]






Appendix

I. Text of Testament of Dom Christian [72]

When an “A-Dieu” takes on a face.
If it should happen one day—and it could be today—
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church, my family,
to remember that my life was given to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept that the Sole Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I ask them to pray for me—
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to be able to link this death with the many other deaths which were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems, alas, to prevail in the world,
even in that which would strike me blindly.
I should like, when the time comes, to have the moment of lucidity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems to me important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder.
To owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be,
would be too high a price to pay for what will, perhaps, be called, the “grace of martyrdom,”
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain islamism encourages.
It is too easy to salve one’s conscience
by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: they are a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I have received from it,
finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel,
learnt at my mother’s knee, my very first Church,
already in Algeria itself, in the respect of believing Muslims.
My death, clearly, will appear to justify
those who hastily judged me naive, or idealistic:
“Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!”
But these people must realise that my avid curiosity will then be satisfied.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—
immerse my gaze in that of the Father,
and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them,
all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit,
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and to refashion the likeness, playfully delighting in the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything.
In this thank you, which sums up my whole life to this moment,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing.
Yes, I also say this Thank You and this A-Dieu to you, in whom I see the face of God.
And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. Amen. (In sha ’Allah).
Algiers, December 1, 1993—Tibhirine, January 1, 1994.
 Christian.          

II. Message of John Paul II, Mass for the Martyrs of Atlas[73]

Dearest Brothers and Sisters,
With a keen sense of participation, I unite with you as you gather around the altar to celebrate, in the sacrifice of Christ, the memory of your seven confreres of the monastery of Our Lady of Atlas, at Tibhirine, in Algeria, who were killed in a barbaric manner last May. With this message I wish to express my spiritual nearness to you and my solidarity, along with a special remembrance in my prayers. “If the grain of wheat falling to the ground does not die, it remains alone; if instead it dies, it produces much fruit. He who loves his life will lose it, while he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If someone wishes to serve me let him follow me, and where I am there also will my servant be. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him” (Jn 12:24-6).
How pertinent are these words of the Gospel! How appropriate they sound, as we think of your seven confreres and of your present Capitular meetings, which are taking place in the light of their witness! The Lord alone can comfort his children in such dramatic trials. Faith in Christ, crucified and risen, tears away the veil of suffering and makes us understand the mysterious fecundity of the death of believers, whose life is not taken away but transformed. I am certain that the sacrifice of the monks of Tibhirine has not failed to provide special inspiration for your Capitular labors, enabling each of you to meet with full openness of Spirit the two great challenges which face you: that of a renewed fidelity to the radical following of Christ, and that of communion within the great Cistercian family. Be certain of this: the blood of martyrs is in the Church a force for renewal and of unity.
“At the end of the second millennium, the Church has become once again a Church of martyrs” (Tertio millennio adveniente, no. 37). The witness of the Trappists of Our Lady of Atlas takes its place alongside that of the Bishop of Oran, His Excellency Pierre Lucien Claverie, and of not a few other sons and daughters on the African continent who, during this period, have given their lives for the Lord and for their brothers and sisters, beginning with those who persecuted and killed them. Their witness is the victory of the Cross, the victory of the merciful love of God, who saves the world. The Testament that Dom Christian de Chergé left behind offered to all the key for understanding the tragic occurrence in which he and his confreres were involved, the final meaning of which is the gift of life in Christ. “My life,” he wrote, “was given to God and to this country.”
Venerable brothers and sisters, you are the custodians of this memory, guardians in prayer, in common discernment, and in the concrete directives which you decide upon, so that the memory of this event may be fruitful in the future for Trappists and for the whole Church. In this rich promise of hope, we invoke the abundance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit on each of you and on the works of your respective Chapters, and we impart to you with all our heart the Apostolic Benediction.
From the A. Gemelli Hospital, October 10, 1996
John Paul II

III. Homily – All Saints,  1996.
Abbot Etienne Baudry, Bellfontaine

“Who are these people dressed in white robes, and where have they come from? These are the people who have been through the great trial; they have washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb” (Rv 7:13–4).
Hearing these words, we cannot, at least I cannot, help making a connection with what happened to our brothers of Atlas in Algeria last spring, when we were celebrating Easter and Paschal time—the kidnapping and tragic death of our brothers.
Along with this gift of their life, they have left us, under the pen of Fr. Christian, a Testament to help us understand and read as correctly as we can today what God was in the process of accomplishing in them and through them. That is why, once again, I have been leaning over Fr. Christian’s Testament to listen to him together with you, and to let him join us.
But at the moment of doing so, I wonder if this is truly the time and place to do it. In the end I decided yes, that this context is even the most appropriate occasion to take another look and to understand, to let him join us and question us.
What we are dealing with is not the narrative of a story at the level of events that succeed each other and brush against each other as on a television screen. It is a thrust into the depths that touches the one central aspect of the mystery of Christ in his passing from death to life. The brothers were summoned and interrogated at Christmas time, but it was during Easter time that they began to follow the Lamb in earnest.
Appended to Fr. Christian’s Testament, written in the shifting of the Old Testament being fulfilled by the sacrifice of the New Testament, are two dates—December 1, 1993, and January 1, 1994. It seems to me that these dates correspond to two stages of the text. The first is when Fr. Christian notes, as if in passing, his reaction to the GIA’s ultimatum, which warned foreigners that from then on they would be victims of violence. “If it should happen one day,” wrote Fr. Christian, “and it could be today—that I become a victim. . . .” Then, for us, his community (his Cistercian family), his Church (all of us), and his relatives (represented here), he formulated four wishes that he would like us to take into account: to remember, to accept, to pray for him, and to expand our prayer.
To remember—that is what we are now doing in the light and power of the memorial of the Lord. To remember that his life and the lives of all seven were “given to God and to this country.”
A life given is the greatest witness. By it we come to a deep unity with him who gave his life for us, with him in whom alone we in our turn are able to give our life for our brothers and sisters.
Christian did not know that the sacrifice would come during Easter time. He was not thinking so, even at the moment when he or they were rudely awakened and kidnapped. But he knew well that when “that” happened, it would be “paschal” by its very nature. And so it happened that the course of events led to the meeting of the symbol and the sacrament.
To accept that the Sole Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.” A heart-rending phrase for those nearest who have to experience it, yet also a phrase as discreet as possible, and one that tries to express what only the language of a love that is stronger than death can make comprehensible. At our celebration at the General Chapter in Rome this past October 12, 1996, when Archbishop Teissier got to this point in his homily, he had to stop because he was overcome by emotion like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. Here acceptance becomes the doorway into communion with what they experienced. This communion can be sealed only in the blood of the Lamb, in the strength of a greater love that is victorious over evil and sin, because the only Son of the Lord of all life passed that way first and because he opened a breach that no one can close.
“I ask them to pray for me,” recalling that “my life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value.” This word is a scandal for some. “So many people,” they say, “have prayed for them . . . but they are dead.” But certainly Fr. Jean-Pierre, one of the brothers who escaped, saw it differently. On the morning of the kidnapping he said, “We must pray for them, they are on a mission,” and when their deaths were announced, he concluded, “They have accomplished their mission!”
To expand their prayer: “to link this death with the many other deaths which were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.” Already “the good thief” who was going to ask and offer forgiveness could not help enlarging his “me” when he said, “Remember me in your kingdom! My life has no more value than any other, nor any less.” From that moment his life was linked by an indissoluble bond to so many others: “My life was given to God and to this country,” to this country because first to God.
An accomplice in the evil.” Now, following in some way these four wishes, comes the act of contrition that rises to his lips and flows from his pen: I know “that I am an accomplice in the evil,” and that makes me “beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings.” He has perfect contrition even on the level of the text, for to the forgiveness asked he adds, like a crown, his forgiveness given to the one who “would strike me blindly,” “who would strike me down.”
Everything is said already in this text, which, it seems to me, dates from the initial shock on December 1 and was never corrected or touched up but was begun all over again on a deeper level on January 1. [The second stage was the result] of a sharp inner debate that led to the rediscovery or at least the revelation of a deep vocation ending in the transfiguration of his already-given forgiveness.
The “debate” arose from scenes of atrocity and was very personal; it arose from the assassination of the Croatians on December 14 and from the Christmas Eve visit of Sayah Attiya with its consequences for the community up to January 1 [1994]. At that point Christian was struggling. He seemed to cry out, “I could not desire such a death,” only to add immediately, with the calmness typical of his temperament, “It seems important to me to state this.” He continued pondering on “the grace of martyrdom,” apparently only to refuse it. He calls this martyrdom “murder” and refuses any joy from it. He rejects with all his power the false interpretation that would identify the true Islam with the caricature of Islamic extremism, which he obviously cannot accept.
There is a message here for us and for our society, a message that I cannot develop but that we must not forget as Christians of France or elsewhere, and that must not be forgotten by the Muslims of Algeria or elsewhere.
The thrust of the debate made him delve into his own special vocation both as to its origin—impossible to describe here—and its Trinitarian conclusion, expressed in the now well-known phrase describing the object of his “avid curiosity.”
The whole mystery of All Saints is gathered together there. I cannot help quoting it: “To immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit.”
At that time it is the mystery of joy that takes over, the joy that he had just refused when confronted in his inner debate by so many atrocities, for “if we remain silent, the very stones of the wadi will howl.” On the other side of anger, a holy and necessary anger, joy may be welcomed, the joy of the Spirit who creates communion, who restores the likeness while “playfully delighting in the differences.” It is the joy of a vocation found, a life given up, “totally mine, totally theirs” (solidarity), a life given up because God seems to have willed it “for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.”
Let it be enough now to recall the climax of his Testament, which leaves each of us in a kind of sacred awe when assassination is envisaged as “an A-Dieu” and the assassin becomes “the friend of my final moment,” in the joy of finding “each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both.”
Dom M. Étienne Baudry, OCSO
Abbot of Bellefontaine, Bégrolles en Mauges

IV. Message to our Christian Friends
The Young Muslims’ Collective of France

We have learned with dismay of the abduction of seven Trappist monks in Algeria, near Médéa. This unworthy, inhuman act cannot be claimed in the name of Islam or in the name of God. We, young Muslims, wish to express to you our brotherhood in these so difficult moments. We firmly condemn the abduction of these men who make a work of solidarity and brotherhood in great humility. Know, dear friends, that we are by your side.
For several decades the Islamic-Christian dialogue has been developing, and this event will not destroy the profound desire to respect each other’s differences, to listen to each other’s points of divergence, and to meditate on the point on which we converge; over and above tolerance, it is divine love and coming closer to God that guide our progress in order to tie and retie our bonds as men of faith.
You are living now at the end of Lent, which concludes with the meal shared by Jesus with the apostles. We pray to the Lord to accept our prayers that his peace may reign in the world of humankind. Like the month of Ramadan, Lent symbolizes another important moment for reflection in the world. Let us share this striving to bring ourselves closer to God, to follow the path of the prophets, and to speak of God’s messengers to coming generations for a better future. O that today we might give witness to this ideal by our faith. With kind regards.                       Published in France, reprinted Journal of Ribât, no. 24 (1996).

Supplement


a) Atlas – Icon of our Vocation,
Archbishop Henri TEISSIER

Homily for the celebration of the Cistercian Chapter
in remembrance of the seven monks of Notre Dame de l’Atlas
Rome - 12 October 1996
Since you have asked me, as Archbishop of Algiers, to deliver the homily at this Mass in remembrance of our seven brother monks during your Chapter, I think I must focus our meditation on the place the monastery held in the life of our local Church. Tibhirine was for us an icon of our vocation as Christians seeking God in the land of Algeria, that is to say in a Muslim land.
To express, before your assembly, this exceptional link which has been established during the years, between the Monastery of Atlas and our Church of Algeria, I will take as my point of departure the “presentation of the monastery to guests”, drawn up by Christian in collaboration with the community, and by which, moreover, opens the book, “Seven lives for God and for Algeria”. [74] Men ” says this text, “continue to give themselves here - that is to say, at Tibhirine - with a heart that is free and submissive to the humble and hidden service of the Utter Greatness and the Utter Charity of God, in the praise of the Hours, the work of their hands and the total sharing of life in community, according to the rule of Saint Benedict, and the spirit and constitutions of the Order of Citeaux ”.
Let us note in passing that the main words of this presentation were chosen with sensitivity to express the Christian Mystery and also take into account spiritual harmonies proper to the Muslims: “with a free and submissive heart ” ..... the Utter Greatness and Utter Charity of God. But we shall return later to this dimension of life at Tibhirine, too important to be merely mentioned in passing.
A true monastery to uphold our identity as Christians in diaspora.
It was first of all a community of contemplative life with which the priests, religious men and women, and lay people of our Church went to be united at Tibhirine. We are a very small Church. We all know one another. Nearly all of us had a personal relationship with the monastery or with one or other of the Fathers. I think there is no other monastery in the world which has such a general relationship with the members of the local Church. Most of the priests, religious men and women, as well as the laity living permanently in the diocese had a personal bond with the monastery.
We are united with Tibhirine first of all because it was a true monastery, a true community of prayer, working with their hands and offering their guests the Gospel values radically lived in the monastic life. Living in a society whose citizens are all Muslims and where manifestations of Christianity would be out of place, we needed these strong times. Symbolically, the only bell that still rang in Algeria was that of Tibhirine. And now that has been silenced.
We needed this spiritual place from which radiated all the richness of the monastic life with its nuances born of filial adoration, fraternal welcome, openness to all, trusting simplicity, respect for others. I knew, in Egypt, a comparable radiation, exercised by the monasteries of Wadi Natroun in the Coptic communities of Cairo and the whole delta, but at Tibhirine there was more. This was not merely a monastery for the Christians in peril of their ecclesial life, but for disciples of Jesus seeking out their non-Christian brothers. Here is another dimension of Tibhirine of which we must now speak.
A monastery, sacrament of our mission
What was peculiar to Notre Dame de l’Atlas compared with other Cistercian monasteries was this engagement of the whole community in the very mission of our Church. Of course, this engagement was lived in the monastic mode, but profoundly bound up with the specific witness which is ours in a Muslim country. The monastery was the contemplative community of a local Church whose vocation is to be without frontiers, the local Church of a Muslim people and of a society of which Islam is the traditional point of reference.
The community of Tibhirine lived this in its manner of openness to its Muslim environment. In prayer always carefully prepared, enlightened by counsels or intentions so rich in suggestion, the liturgy of the monastery took on the whole life of the country with its religious and cultural values, its battles, its lacerations and its hopes. The hospitality at the monastery was equally open to everyone, each according to their need, the Christian for the Eucharist, the Muslim for spiritual sharing, the poor to have their needs attended to, the sick to be cured.
Let us return, in order to understand it, to the document of presentation of the monastery. After the introduction of its foundation in the Cistercian monastic life, the text continues: “Guests of the almost entirely Muslim Algerian people, these brothers would like to contribute to witnessing that peace among peoples is a gift of God given to men everywhere and at all times, and that it is up to believers, here and now, to manifest this inalienable gift especially by the quality of their mutual respect and support which requires a healthy and fruitful spiritual emulation,
On behalf the the praying people of Islam, they profess to celebrate this communion day and night, developing and welcoming untiringly the signs, as perpetual beggars of love, during their whole life, please God, in the enclosure of the monastery, dedicated to the patronage of Mary, mother of Jesus, under the title of ‘Notre Dame de l’Atlas’ .” (p. 24)
And now we have the second reason each of us had to unite ourselves with the community of Notre Dame de l’Atlas. In participating in the life of prayer of the community, in profiting by its spiritual welcome, we join ourselves, certainly, to the Gospel values lived radically, as in every monastic community, but we were above all nourished in our own vocation, in our specific mission as the Church in a Muslim country, open to the values of its spiritual tradition, offering gestures of solidarity and respect in our daily relations with men and women of another religious community.
This is precisely how the monks lived, not only through the service of the dispensary which Brother Luc ran, but also through the daily collaboration of Christophe, Paul and Michel with the local people associated in the garden work, through the relations of the porter, Fr Amédée with the villagers, young and old, boys and girls who rang the bell at the small door all day long, through the hospitality in the guest-house of Célestin, Christian and Christophe, through the errands of Jean-Pierre to the nearby town, since according to the terms of the presentation of the monastery, this was “a place of prayer and spiritual refreshment open to all whenever one came seeking an atmosphere of silence and recollection, which would light up the journey of a man or woman on the path of
life ...” (p. 25)
The sacrifice to be accepted with them
And so this is the sacrifice God has asked of us through the immolation of our brothers. This spiritual place where we found refreshment as well as our Christian identity and our mission in Islam territory, has been destroyed by criminal violence.
Yet, despite our suffering, how could we fail to unite ourselves with the motivations which animated our brother monks since December 1993, after the first visit of an armed group to the monastery, when they chose to remain in spite of the risks they were running? I was with them when they took this decision, consciously, after a community discernment, but also each one individually. How could they abandon the people whom God had sent them to save, and also, their community life? How could they, who celebrated the sacrifice of Christ every day of their life, refuse to take the risk of loving unto death?
Already on 14th December 1993, meditating on the assassination of the twelve Croatians, Fr Christian wrote: “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (Jn. 15:13).Better do it in advance, and for everyone, as Jesus did. In such a way that the one who believes he is putting you to death will not take your life from you; unknown to him, this gift has already been consented to, to him as to others”” (p. 135) A meditation which Christian had already committed to his Testament drawn up some months earlier: “If it should happen one day - and it could be today - that I become a victim of the terrorism ... I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country”.(p. 210)
Thus, our brother monks with whom we were united - as we have already said - at the same time the heart of our Christian identity and a monastic expression of our common mission in Muslim territory, also walked further than we on the path of a love which accepts all risk, but which forms part of the vocation of our whole Church and of each one of us.
With you, with their families, with their neighbours of Tibhirine, with many men and women of good will in Algeria, in Morocco, in France and elsewhere, we are deprived of their presence, of their welcome, of their support, but with you, with Amédée and Jean-Pierre, with the community at Fes and with all the friends of the monastery, we must offer their sacrifice and consent to it.
None of us, in our Church in Algeria, can imagine how they could have gone, leaving the place of their spiritual solidarity to save their lives, even though each one of us had so hoped before their abduction, and still more after it, that the disarmed sincerity of their offering of life would disarm the very ones who had abducted them, as Christian himself told the meeting of the Ribat on the eve of the abduction: “If one offers oneself unarmed and sees that the other is capable of allowing himself to be disarmed, this will make violence improbable”. (Ribat no. 24). And in fidelity to Christian and to the Gospel, despite the violence of which they were victims, we still believe in the efficacy of this disarmed fraternity, an evangelical efficacy belonging to the Paschal Mystery.
Forty days after their sacrifice, came that of Mgr. CLAVERIE, bishop of Oran, who had written in the same vein: “We have formed with the Algerians relations which nothing, even death, can destroy. In this we are disciples of Jesus Christ, and that is everything”. (Pierre CLAVERIE, Lettres et Messages d’Algérie, Karthala, 1996, p. 172).
After such a reminder, there remains only one Question, which is this: who will receive the vocation to inherit, with the faithful community of Fes, the spiritual and missionary bequest of our brothers of Notre Dame de l’Atlas? Our Church is waiting for the brothers God will send. She needs them in order to live. The people of Tibhirine are awaiting their return and guarding the monastery, which is, nevertheless, left empty in an isolated region. Many Algerians, who have seen as we have, in Christian’s Testament and the sacrifice of our brothers, a sign from God, are awaiting this sign of trust and hope. Who will give it henceforth?

b) Gethsemani Buddhist-Christian Encounter

(Gethsemani Encounter of Buddhist-Christian Meditation, at Gethsemani Abbey, KY in July, 1996. The tragedy of Atlas was much in mind as the following conference by Dom Armand Veilleux and the words of Dom Bernardo in the discussion  show. The paper is included on the Atlas Homepage, http://www.agora.stm.it/A.Veilleux/atlas.htm ).

The Importance of the Monastic Community and the Church in the Contemplative Life . – Armand Veilleux.
The word "contemplation" is a beautiful and rich word. It is also an ambiguous one, because of the various ways in which it has been understood in the Christian tradition. The expression "contemplative life", used in the title of this talk, does not have the same ambiguity. It expresses very well what I consider to be the most important dimension of contemplation. Contemplation, as I see it, is not an isolated act, some kind a peak experience attained in some rare occasions. It is a way of life.
As Christians, we have our spiritual roots in the religious experience of Israel, and the main characteristic of the religious experience of the people of Israel was to have perceived God as someone present to its life – its victories and its defeats, its joys and its suffering. A contemplative person is not only someone who sees God, that is, who sees God in everything and in everyone, but also a person who sees everything and everyone with God's eyes. The contemplative person is the one who is deeply present to everything she/he lives and experiences.
The God of the Bible and the Father of Jesus Christ, is neither someone far distant in Heaven who cannot be reached by human beings, nor someone who deals with isolated individuals. Our God wants to establish deeply personal relationship with each one of us, but always reminding us that we are part of a people, of a family of believers, of a family of nations. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God of Jesus Christ, who is the first born of a multitude of believers.
For that reason, there is an essential relationship between contemplative life and the experience of community and church. Christ is the Sacrament of Salvation, because he is the perfect visible manifestation, the perfect incarnation of the Father's desire of salvation for the whole humankind. The Church, that is, the community of those who believe in Christ, is the visible manifestation of the same reality under the sign of a visible and active communion in love, faith and hope. To receive Christ's message is to be called to follow him with others and to embody his message of universal love in our life of service, worship and universal compassion, with others. A monastic community is a particular way of realizing that mission and that sacrament.
This, of course, can be lived in various ways. I will speak from the experience of a coenobitic monastic tradition that follows the Rule of Saint Benedict and that has been handed down to me through the Cistercian way of life.
The only way to speak about such reality is to speak from experience. I could speak from my own experience, sharing with you my desires, my trials and my failures, but also my ongoing commitment to this contemplative search. I could also speak from the experience of all those who have shared with us what they have tried to live, through their teaching and their writings. And the body of Christian and monastic literature on contemplative life is very large. I have rather chosen to present to you the experience of a concrete community of Christian monks who have recently achieved, through their martyrdom, the ultimate realization of their contemplative community experience. They developed that experience through several years of common life, and showed its authenticity by facing death together. What they lived was particularly well expressed in a short text written by one of them.
You have already understood that I am talking about the community of O.L. of Atlas, in Algeria, and about Dom Christian de Chergé's Testament.
That small monastic community was a typically Christian community, that is, not a group of people who had chosen each other, but a group of persons who had chosen the same vocation, or rather who had all been called to the same mission. The history of the community is complex. Founded as a refuge by a group of monks from Slovenia in 1934, it soon became a regular foundation of a French abbey, when Algeria was still a French territory. The monastery survived the war of Independence of Algeria and the departure of almost all te French from Algeria. At some point the Order thought of closing it, but then decided to maintain it as a Christian contemplative presence in a Muslim society. The community was then refurbished with monks coming from various communities and different monastic traditions. They were all strong people who had chosen to come to Algeria. It was only through dialogue, prayer and contemplative attention to the manifestations of God's will that they attained a deep and amazing unity that kept them joyfully courageous during the dangerous last three years of their life.
Let us now look at some aspects of their experience through some passages of Christian's Testament (which was a text written on the day when the first threats against their life were made):
If it should happen one day... that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family to remember that my life was given to God and to this country.
There are several elements of great significance in that short sentence. Christian wants his community, his Church, his family to remember something. His life has not been a solitary relationship between him and God. He is aware of belonging to a community (my community); to a Church (my Church) and to a natural family (my family). All those relationships were very important for him. But more important was the fact that his life did not belong to him. It had been given. And it had given not only to God but also to this country, that is, Algeria. Everything here is very incarnated. He does not own his own life; he does not own his community, his church, his family; he has renounced them; but they remain important for him. He is, therefore, a free man, a poor and a pure of heart who can see God.
That radical detachment was not something done one day once for all, and done alone. It was a common experience he had done with the rest of his community. In their last circular letter, in December 1995, the brothers of Atlas said, speaking of a possible death: "the violent death of one of us or of all of us together would be simply the logical consequence of all the forms of renunciation we have already done: of family, country, community in order to follow Christ..."
Because of all these encompassing forms of renunciation, the real community of Christian and of his brothers his made up not only of the twelve monks of Tibhirine and Fès, but also of the members of their respective family, and of all the Algerian people, whom they loved.
Christian loves them so much that he cannot desire martyrdom, since this would be to desire that someone whom he loves should commit a terrible crime against the God of live.
I don't see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will be called, perhaps, the "grace of martyrdom", to owe this to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
Someone who has reached that level of purity of heart is a real contemplative. And this is the deep relationship between community life and contemplative life. We must now read the most important section of Christian's text:
"... my most insistent curiosity will then be set free. This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills, immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, playing with the differences."
In everything that has been said and written about inter-religious dialogue, I don't think there is anything whatsoever that has reached such a depth. On the one hand their is this contemplative attitude that wants to see through God's eyes and contemplate all his children of Islam (of Buddhism, of Hinduism, of Israel, etc.) as he sees them, in all their shining beauty. On the other hand their is this beautiful vision of a playful God who takes a secret joy in establishing communion, refashioning in each one the original likeness (His likeness), playing with the differences.
Then, Dom Christian thanks God for his life:
"This life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God who seems to have wished it entirely...
In this THANK YOU which is said for everything in my life, from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, O my friends of this place..."
Then comes the most mysterious and most beautiful part of the text. At the beginning of the Testament there was a kind of sub-title: "Quand un A-Dieu est en-visagé" The French word A-Dieu is much stronger than the English equivalent "Farewell". (Actually, it corresponds to the original meaning of Good Bye). Then there is a play with the French word en-visagé; which means "envisaged", contemplated, but can also mean, in the line of thought of Lévinas, en-visagé: that is something that has received a visage, or has been transformed into a visage.
With this in mind we can understand the final part of the message, where Christian speaks to the person who might take his life:
And you too, my last-minute friend, who would not have known what you were doing.. Yes, for you too I say this Thank You and this A-Dieu "en-visagé de toi": that is, commending you to the God who has taken a visage in you (or in whose face I see God).
This capacity of seeing God's face, God's incarnation, in the person who is slitting your throat is certainly the fruit of a profound contemplative life lived in deep relationship with a group of brothers, with a Church and with the whole human family.
The community of O.L. of Atlas was an ordinary small monastic community, living a life of solitude, prayer, work and silence. When it became dangerous for foreigners and especially for Christians to stay in Algeria, and when they were all invited to leave, several people said to the monks: "You should leave. We understand that missionaries want to stay in order to continue their work of evangelization; but there is no reason for you to stay here, since you can continue your life of prayer in any other place. To pray here or to pray in France is just the same thing." Such a reasoning did not make any sense to these monks. Because they had lived that life of prayer for so long together and in that place, not only had they become deeply united as a community, but they had created deep bonds with the whole local Church, on the one hand, and also with a group of devout Muslims, especially a Sufi community, that regularly came to the monastery to reflect and pray with them, on the other hand. They had also developed deep bonds of friendship with the local population, to the point of letting the local Muslims use a building of the monastery as the village mosche.
Does all of that has anything to do with contemplative life? Of course it has. It was their presence, not as individuals, but as a Christian community in a Muslim world that gradually enabled them to see God – not an abstract God, but a God who had been "en-visagé", that is, who had assumed a face in each one of those Muslim brothers, including the one who might slit their throats.
And the story has not stopped with their death. Because of what these very humble and simple monks lived, and because of the way they died, millions of people, including millions of Algerian Muslims, have also seen something of God's face in them. Contemplative life has no frontiers.

Discussion (Report, Maibag, US Region, Nov-Dec 1996)
“Forgiveness & Karma”, Dom Bernardo Olivera
In his letter, Christian explains the motives that led the monks of Atlas to remain there. In the final sentences he speaks directly to his murderer and addresses him as his friend. “his unseen friend”, and expressly forgives him. Then he says that when he, Christian, stands before the face of God and rejoices in Him he hopes that his unknown friend will be at his side.
When the discussion began, several offered sympathy to Armand and the Trappists for their loss. Then one of the Buddhists, an American, asked what about the bad karma that accrued to the murderers. Did Christianity have anything to say about that? Several Christians tried to answer but not very successfully. Finally, Bernardo Olivera, Abbot General of the Trappists, who was in the audience, was asked if he could respond. Bernardo spoke of his personal relation with each of the monks of Atlas. As Abbot General he had participated in some of the discussions with the monks of Atlas and had spoken to each of them at length on a number of occasions concerning the possibility of being murdered. Bernardo said that he spoke from deep knowledge of each monk and from his own heart. None of the monks wanted an evil to fall upon those who killed them, neither in this life nor hereafter. He knew that he was not well acquainted with Buddhism and possibly did not really understand what karma meant. Speaking as a Christian, he forgave every one and any one who had anything to do with the death of these monks. This forgiveness was not simply an intellec­tual idea but from the bottom of his heart. He spoke for himself, for the dead monks and for every member of his Order that he had spoken to. This forgiveness included a gift of love that wished the best for those men. Like Christian he, too, prayed for the men who killed the monks. He knew that it was done out of a real ignorance and a perverted zeal for God. He, too, hoped with all his heart that the killers will some day stand before the face of Cod along with the monks of Atlas and with all the monks and nuns of his Order.
When the Abbot General sat down, there was silence in the hall for a few moments. Then the person who posed the question got up and said that it was the first time that it occurred to him that forgiveness could destroy negative karma. The response gave him a lot of food for reflection.
For the rest. of the meeting the intervention of Dom Bernardo was frequently mentioned by the Buddhists as one of the most enlightening moments of the conference.

c) Spiritual Struggle of Monks in Algeria
 
Abbots and Abbesses of France

One week after the abduction of the monks of Our Lady of Atlas, the Trappist abbots and abbesses of France confirmed the absolute neutrality of their brothers. Here is the full text of their statement, dated 4 April
Our brother monks of Algeria... It is now more than a week since seven of our brother monks have been abducted from their monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. They have not been seen since.... a difficult and distressing situation. For them, for their friends in Algeria, for their families and for us this is a hostage situation.
The very tactful and capable press coverage of these heated events has given rise to considerable emotion and sympathy in our country, which has touched us greatly. We would like to thank everyone for this.
As no progress has been made, there is scarcely any news. Therefore, we risk forgetting the Brothers who at this very moment are undergoing, we continue to hope, a very important spiritual struggle, not only for themselves but even more so for the good of the country to which they found themselves called to follow their monastic life. Consequently, it would be tragic if the meaning of this struggle were falsified or distorted.
The presence of these monks in Algeria is not a new phenomenon. They have been there for more than sixty years. They witnessed the Franco-Algerian war, independence, etc. And as the situation gradually deteriorated into the current state of violence — of which they in their turn, after so many others, have become victims — they did not make an obstinate stand at all cost but regularly asked themselves whether or not they should remain. It was clear to them that should specific threats be made against them then they ought to leave.
In the past, our Abbot General, Dom Bernardo Olivera, and, more recently, our Procurator General, Dom Armand Veilleux have discussed this very point with each of the Brothers and have confirmed them in their special vocation.
In this document, we, the Superiors of the Trappist monasteries and convents of France wish to state that there is no other possible explanation of the reasons for the presence of these monks in Algeria than that which they themselves gave consistently and with great clarity. We can thus stress the following in particular:
–   These monks are first and foremost guests of a foreign and independent country which welcomes them with all of the generosity for which it is well-known. This situation, like the monastic vocation itself, imposes on them an obvious duty of impartial reserve towards Algerian society in general and towards political parties in particular. They never departed from this position of absolute neutrality.
–   The presence of their monastery in the Atlas Mountains is not quite as strange as it might seem, since this is a region where very ancient traces of Christianity are still quite visible, and our brother monks of Tibhirine, far from being unaware of the present religious realities of that country, have been able to find in their contact with Islam a very precious and very fertile source of dialogue, of sharing and of prayer.
–   The monks have long since disposed of the properties that they had inherited. They have chosen to live more simply from work in their garden, like and with their neighbours. It is in this close neighbourliness, on a daily basis, that they have most experienced the priceless tenderness which the ordinary people of Algeria have shown towards them by their hospitality. This is one of the reasons for their special love for this place.
–   There is, of course, the doctor. Everyone speaks of him. Since he has been there for fifty years it is obvious that his presence and his work have greatly influenced the history of this monastic community and of the local population. But it would be unthinkable even to suspect that he had agreed to “negotiate” conditions under which he might be allowed to practice his profession, even for an instant.
At this point in time, only our prayer can effectively reunite our Brothers. But our vigilance is no less essential so that they will never lack the strength of our love and of our intercession.
(Translation: L. & V. Devlin)

d) Representatives of the Muslims of France
Paris, May 7th 1996


Letter to the Abductors of the seven Trappist Monks from Tibhérine
In the name of God, the Clement and Merciful one:
You have within your power of Life and Death seven Trappist monks abducted on 27th March from their monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas de Tibhérine.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven elderly, harmless men who have struck you no blow nor inflicted any malice upon you.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven men of Faith who have consecrated their lives to prayer, contemplation and to the service of God.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven people who have chosen for many years to be your neighbours and have preferred you to other people and other places.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven peacemaking individuals who, although knowing the danger they lived in, remained faithful to their calling and to their charitable work.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven men whose families and loved ones tremble at the lack of clarity of their condition and the uncertainty of their fate.
You have within your power of Life and Death seven defenceless hostages threatened with having their throats cut if other prisoners are not freed.
 But what would the freedom of those people be worth if owed to the blood of these innocent men? All these considerations should lead you to liberate IMMEDIATELY the seven monks of Tibhérine and to grant them safeguard and protection.
If these men are detained in the name of Islam, then all Muslims, whether they wish it or not, are from this moment responsible for their lives as it true that:
“He who kills a man who, himself, has not killed, or who has committed no violence on Earth, is considered as if he had killed all men; and he who saves a single man, is considered as if he had saved all men,” . (Koran, Sourate V, Al-Ma’Idah, verset 82)
If these men are detained because they are monks, then all Muslims, particularly the Sunnites, are obliged to preserve their lives for it is said:
“You will avoid the killing of monks and rabbis unless they have been aggressors” (La RISALA, Ibn Abi Zayd Al-Qayrawani, Chapter on the “Jihad”)
 We ask you as representatives of the Muslims of France to give a guarantee of the lives and safety of our seven compatriots and to bring about their return to liberty as quickly as possible.
 (Translation: L. & V. Devlin)

e) Tibhirine. (6 weeks after abduction)

There's fog creeping round
the trees, the still hills,
it wraps up the bird-song.
No echo from this last as on
a morning when fiery red
great warming sun
hurls golden beams through
the clear, clean, clinging air,
burnishing every colour
with glow;
swelling each wondrous thing's particularity;
spinning round each mating song
a weave of magic:
flashing forth ‘self‑expression’
which catches my attention,
lifting my heart
to Him — of all this
the Start.
But too, the fog creeps
around my soul.
Our seven brothers of Tibhirine,
Oh! where are they now?
. . . . .Gone the dear Christ from his throne,
closed the doors of Mary's house,
snuffed out the contest in zeal . . . . .
Are they
in pain? in chains?
in dark? in hell?
Well-hidden by wicked men –
dark deed which Love does condemn.
A wound to Citeaux's choirs:
whose psalms, which rise as spires,
implore Love's graciousness
to gather those seven men
as chicks by their mother hen.
Fr. Martin, Nunraw


f) After Atlas Mass,Trinity Sunday 1996
St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh

O Tibhirine, O Tibhirine,
a mother distraught,
whose land has been harrowed
by fear and despair,
from anger and hating and killing
by unnatural men.
You've suffered and wept –
unnoticed by media and press;
our shame, we didn't care less.
But now there's come home
right into our hearths,
your pain and your sorrow,
too deep and too vast
to relate.
Your thousands, your few,
unknown, those you knew –
we shared in your grief
as best as we could,
on this festive day.
Especially among them our seven,
who followed the Lamb
to adorn your dear land,
vowed lovers of you and your children;
they too were your children,
were victims of those angry men,
who slew them because they were Christians,
reply to a blackmail that failed.
A text from the lectern was read.
We listened …… how poignant its words …
Dom Christian's own passion unfolded.
Well-knowing the danger he lived in,
how soon would his death be his womb?
Prophetic, precise and assured,
yet gentle and trusting,
no pity for self,
refusing to blame;
even
forgiveness for him who would kill him,
make merry with him in the Vision
— O mystery of love. —
And gratitude vast
from future to past
for family, Citeaux, Islam and God,
illumined with happy ‘A-Dieu!’
As Christian confessed,
did we to ourselves
“Will we thank our God in testing to come,
to even shedding our blood?
Will we thank the one
when his work's being done
for seeing God’s face in his face?”
For each monk a candle was lovingly lit,
the seven incensed as was fit;
embedding in feelings
by symbol and fire,
the mem'ry of Love's perfect choice.
By weaving of violin and organ and choir
the scene was enriched as they sang,
to Puccini's reflections,
‘Eternal rest grant unto them.’
O yes, it was true,
a tear from each eye,
the pathos … a sigh …
But joy to the fore
then sprang through us all
with thoughts of those martyrs –
how nobly they'd answered their call!
Fr. Martin, Nunraw


g) MORE ALIVE THAN EVER
by Marie Romanens
La Croix 29 May 1996

(“… a remarkable reading of the Testament of Fr. Christian”,
 Père Philippe, Tamié)
By the time this issue of Actualité Religieuse reaches you, it will be a month and a half since the murder of the seven Trappist monks in Algeria was announced. The event is worthy of lengthy meditation, of being carried in our hearts. The witness of these men who carried their human destiny through to the very end is startling. The Testament which Father Christian de Chergé, Prior of Notre-Dame d’Atlas, gave to his family two years earlier under the title “When an ‘A-Dieu’ takes on a face” speaks to us in words of blazing intensity.
The thread of physical life was suddenly snapped. Yet, these monks are more alive than ever: their life shines forth with dazzling brightness, disconcerting more than a few, in the tidal wave which has unfurled since the news broke. For there is a thread which can never be severed: the bond between men persists beyond any death. To an outstanding degree, the monks were aware of their responsibility for this precious and fertile bond of humanity. Despite all security considerations, they decided to remain in Algeria, in this country to which they were so firmly bound. “For me, Algeria and Islam are ...a body and a soul.” wrote their Father Prior. Their commitment was therefore physical, lived out in the concrete reality of daily life in osmosis with this land. It was also spiritual, reverberating in their hearts and aspirations. The monks had received so much from this country, which is as beautiful as it is afflicted. They had also given so much by sharing in the life and suffering of the people. Fortified by this fruitful exchange, they had no wish in the hour of ultimate danger to avoid the demands of the bond so firmly established. They refused to abandon the country overwhelmed by barbaric madness and their friends in distress. On the contrary, they chose to remain faithful to their commitment, throwing in their lot for better or for worse in the physical struggle.
This “worse” was doubtless the trial of the agony. In the face of inhuman dereliction, they had to overcome the most deeply rooted visceral reactions, those which drive every individual to seek comfort, well-being, safety and protection. Above all, they confronted the emotions which engulf every human being when the final hour approaches: the terrible anguish before non-being, when nothing remains and all passes away and ones being is hemmed in by the unknown of a nameless black hole .... above all, they confronted the forces of destruction: those in their murderers of course, but also –
and this may surprise some people – their own. “I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in that which would strike me blindly.” writes Father Christian de Chergé in his last testament. The place of the shadow is not denied, it is fully recognised. Total lucidity. The monks did not see themselves on the side of the “good”. To do this would have made them victims of the “wicked”, and this would probably have given them an excuse for leaving double quick. No! The demands of truthfulness led them to greater self-knowledge: they recognised that they too, like everyone else, had their own share of inhumanity. They accepted their responsibility for the existence of evil: when there is a failure to respect the other or oneself, when “I” and “Thou” cannot co-exist. The forces of destruction are not limited to visibly violent acts. They are also at work in a hidden fashion in a thousand acts and words in the daily life of each person: when the eye refuses to see, the hand to stretch out, the ear refuses to hear and the heart remains uncaring, when words become wounding, thoughts imprisoning judgments and misunderstanding rules. The forces of destruction are constantly at work - separating, severing bonds, opposing and, by denying being, they become pitilessly murderous. The attitude of the monks contrasted starkly with that of fundamentalists, who fail to recognise the violent impulses to which they are prey. For them, only the other is the bearer of “evil”. By their radical attempt to free themselves from the enemy, fanatics have the illusion that Good and Evil can quickly be separated. But day after day they sink deeper into a process of death which will not let them go.
The Trappists did not try to deny their responsibility. They had not been spared inhumanity, unlike most men and women who pay it not a thought. By recognising their imperfection and facing up to the carnal nature of their being, they were able to go further, to reach a space where the strength of the bond triumphs. This bond is acheived first with oneself: through acceptance of all aspects of oneself, even the most disreputable. Then the bond can be extended to others, to what is best in them and to what is worst. This acceptance - of both self and the other - can then bear its full fruit. Then the outrageous abundance of this total commitment blossom in a true union. Then, from the very heart of the agony the song of gratitude for the gift of Life can be sung. Beyond the horror of murder, this thanksgiving embraces all, for the bond of the One who is alive has now proved victorious:
“And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, I also say this Thank You”
 Translation: M.C.G.

h) Video— Atlas Presentation

Santa Rita Abbey, Arizona.
You might be interested in the genesis of this video. At Fr. Jean Pierre's request I brought home with me the slides he had brought to Mondo Migliore (General Chapter Oct.1997). I had duplicates made so as not to risk the originals during the process.
Two young people in Tucson who have started their own business (‘BIack Butterfly'); donated their labour (not the materials) because they were impressed with the Atlas story. Sr. Joy from our community arranged the slides in an order more compatible with the audio, added a few more photos gleaned from various sources, and worked with the artists in their studio as the video was created.
The translation of the text was made here, as best we could.
A copy of the video is being sent to each our houses in the U.S. and Canada, and also--in the appropriate format – to each of the houses in France. Other Regions will receive copies and hopefully can share with houses in their Region.
All of us here at Santa Rita feel blessed at the privilege of getting to know better the faces of these Seven.
Mother Beverly Aitken, Prioress

 
When Abraham. . . (Music)
When Abraham and.
Millions of stars in the sky
Walked in the heart of the Eternal
When Abraham. . .
When Abraham and. . .
Millions of moons and suns
Shone out to the stars of the Eternal.
W e walk in a great desert
We walk … the light
We walk, pilgrims on this earth
We walk to become their brothers.

Our monastery has chosen to nestle in the welcoming foliage of this good old oak tree. There, Tibhirine, and since 1988, at Fés in Morocco There, under the gaze of her who is all unified and prayerful in love, all holy Miriam, Marie The mother of this Jesus of whom we are the brothers With us she is there on the mountain Notre Dame de l'Atlas" is our name.
When toward … the setting
of the Orient towards the Occident
Millions of hearts of children, given,
Awoke in the heart of the Eternal
When … toward the setting
of the east toward the west
Children of all confessions
awoke in the heart of the Eternal
We walk in a great desert
We walk …

In search of the One In desire for the Unique. Pray-ers among other pray-ers. We live together the adventure of a community existence in the manner of the Gospel. This is not easy. There are many ways of following Jesus.
In the … of God We have received a guide, Benedict. An Italian, born around 480, near Rome. He sought God; He let himself be found by Him. So that others might share his spiritual experience he composed a Rule.
This Benedictine Rule is for us within the great monastic tradition the word of a spiritual father showing us the way of life. Listen, my son, you will arrive in progress of conversion and of faith.
So, we are Benedictines, but this is not all. At the Benedictine monastery of Molesmes in France at the end of the 11th. century a group of monks, after discussion, decided to leave to go back to a simpler and more authentic observance of the Rule. Robert. Alberic, and Stephen were the first abbots of a new monastery founded in 1098 at Citeaux near Dijon. Whence our name "Cistercian."
St. Bernard entered in 1112/13 with thirty companions He would leave a strong mark on the nascent Order by his personality, his spiritual teaching and even more: his holiness
In the 17th century after a long period of laxity abbot de Rance effected the reform of his monastery of La Trappe in Normandy, whence the name "Trappists" which has also been given us.
We are today throughout the world men and women a great Cistercian family united by a "Charter of Charity"
Each autonomous monastery is connected to a filiation. So N.D. of Atlas is the daughter of N.D. of Aiguebelle in Drôme.
Monk: but what is the gist of who we are?
One who like Jesus, our Lord and Master does not marry remains alone, monk, monos. He dwells with himself, he digs out this solitude like a well from which will spring up communion. He explores the silence in search of a sure word that might hold fast. He offers to the Word the shelter of his conscience, the refuge of his heart so that in His goodness He might place there His presence the fire of His Spirit to share.
Our life is a long, patient, and monotonous effort, a combat each day to become peaceful, disarmed, unified, conformed to Jesus, the Unique and Beloved of God, Prince of peace, conqueror by obedience.
Father, may your will be done."
One among us, elected by his brothers, holds his place: that of servant, that of pastor giving his life for his sheep. Abbot, prior, he guides, accompanies, teaches.
This monastery is not a museum. Nothing exceptional. There live there very ordinary brothers in Algeria as in Morocco. In 1843 a first abbey was able to be built in the area of Staoueli by monks coming from different monasteries –from Aiguebelle, too. They departed in 1903.
One would wait until 1934 to see come from the east Yugoslavian monks, their liberty threatened, looking for a land of welcome to live there in peace. Established first at Ouled-Triff then at Ben-Chicao the little group taken h1 hand by the abbey of Aiguebelle settled here in the area of Tibhirine on March 7, 1938. And now at the call of the church in Morocco there is this annex at the gate of Fes.

Fifty years and more. Many a tempest weathered storms threatened . . . was not lacking and God permitted that this house hold fast. A house to shelter his name and all these lovely names: house of peace, of mercy, of tenderness, Our Lady of Atlas house of prayer, for all the peoples house open. The retreat house welcomes those who desire to live a time of retreat, of desert. At the porter's lodge at the dispensary with Brother Luke ties are established with the neighbourhood, ties which bind our hearts and bring us into solidarity with a shared history.
A house open to the streets – this is vital but there is the cloister to shape out the indispensable interior –  and what is done, inside, hidden in this dwelling? This house is a workshop –  Benedict would have it so –  a school of the Lord's service, the school of Jesus gentle and humble of heart. Close to so many others around us who let themselves be instructed by the Spirit one learns together through the days the deeds of this place peace, mercy and patience
The sharing of joy and troubles, almsgiving, fasting, prayer.
According to the work of God in us Opus Dei does not dispense us from all labour, all concern. They will be truly monks, says St. Benedict if they work with their hands. There are different employments, all these things you need to do so that the house be human, fraternal There is the land to cultivate to render it nourishing and livable-Vegetable garden, orchard, bee hives Flowers too.
Work itself is shared in association with a few neighbours for things grown for market there are sown there tomatoes, turnips, eggplants. greens. And in this God's market little seeds of peace, of friendship, of trust. Who knows? The wind uses them to make the earth fruitful here, elsewhere.
And we are happy to be able to live together here as brothers, residents on a welcoming land, a little cell of the Church among others, attached, they too, to this land, to its people.
After a long time of reflection, of maturing, postulate, novitiate, temporary commitment-five years or more, there is solemn profession. Freely, the one who has begun to run commits himself in the community. He makes a vow of stability in church with his brothers, he renounces all.
He is going to stay there and endure relying on the fidelity of God. But stability doesn't mean being settled in. Come. . .
We are pilgrims, people on the way, seekers. Oh! Do you know what Benedict proposes to us to accomplish this journey? A ladder. The ladder of humility to go to the most real within me To God it raises me and makes me pass to the most real in Himself, . . . to the praise of His glory.
A combat, a house cloistered a way within the limits of a ladder. Lies there withal for happiness? "Let us seek a workman in the crowd of humankind", the Lord says. "Who is he who loves life and desires to see good days?" The monk, the Christian, the believer, the human being as a question –  and he answers "Here I am.
We love life. Then, we are going to exert ourselves to live it to the full day and night, night and day. Called in the night we rise to keep watch awaiting the daylight. Called again six times a day we leave our work, our occupation to offer to God a response, a praise morning and evening at the third, the sixth, the ninth hour-Tierce, Sext, None-and then at Compline when the time for rest has come and so on until the last hour of death welcomed.
Finally, as this monk is said to keep quiet, man of silence, yes –  but first he is a professed, he who professes, he who proffers reading, reciting, murmuring, psalming, meditating praying the word of life. The silent heart stores up all these things like Mary. He ruminates them, he feeds on them in desire. Always.
So then, living monks, we desire for ourselves, for all our brothers and sisters of this world good days and we believe that they come to them where the heart that is poor receives this happiness promised to all humankind manifested in Jesus Christ –  this happiness that a merciful God desires to be able to live together, all under His gaze, one in His love, for his joy of the Father.
(The dots represent words the translator wasn’t able to decipher from the tape.)


i) Personality of the Year  Award,
by the Belgian Daily Newspaper

Report from Brussels – 17 March, 1997
Catholic World Today (Global Catholic Radio),
Broadcast
Josef Lopusznzski, Presenter:
“As Belgium still reels from  revelations about the corruption of the authorities, and the inefficiency combined with  the lack of co-operation surrounding the affair of the missing and murdered children, a very special ceremony has taken place at the National Theatre in Brussels. Donald McGlynn reports:
This year the Personality of the Year  award, by the Belgian Newspaper, La Libre, has paid homage to the two groups of people who have been the victims of crimes against humanity,   children, murdered and missing, victims of pedophile rings, and  Bishop Claverie and the seven Monks of Tibérine killed in Algeria.
Messenger
Hand and bird, earth and heaven, ourselves and the victims, the artist wished to perpetuate the life of the innocent – ‘they live on’.
At the highly emotional ceremony, the association of the two awards, for the child victims of crime and the monks murdered by terrorists was given special significance by the celebrated Belgian artist and sculptor, Jean-Michel Folon. in the words "Innocence assassinated". Himself the father of a handicapped child he said, "We live in a strange period of time in which one tragedy follows another. When someone assassinates a child, it is innocence which is assassinated. When someone assassinates monks, it is innocence which is assassinated." Every thing which touches innocence, all the problems concerning infancy, every injustice, stirs me to the depths …
I believe that killing a  child, is killing the child deep within each one of us.
Receiving the award on behalf of his martyred brothers,  Fr. Jean Pierre, one of the two monks who escaped the massacre in Algeria, brought a message of hope.
"We must never despair of man", he said, "As long as the monks were animated by this faith  they could not quit their post in Algeria, no matter how dangerous it became.
We must believe in the beauty of the fruits of reconciliation with our Muslim brothers", he concluded.
Present at the ceremony were the parents and families of the missing children, abbots, monks and nuns of the Cistercian Order, various Belgian dignitaries, and readers of La Libre, the newspaper which made the awards.” (End of Broadcast).
The Cistercian (Trappist) monasteries of Atlas (Fes), Aiguebelle, Westmalle, Scourmont, Orval, Nunraw, Chimay, Soleilmont, Klaarland, Brialmont, were represented at the award for their Brothers of Atlas. The writer was invited to attend  this unique award presentation in  Brussels and was asked by the director, M. Valentin, for copies of the Sancta Maria (Nunraw) icon in memory of the seven martyred monks to present to 700 guests. This icon, painted by Sister M. Peter of Whitland (see below), was printed freely by J.S. Burns, Glasgow.

j) Icon of Sancta Maria

To the Memory of Monks of Atlas
by Sr. Peter, Holy Cross Abbey, Whitland
Seven candles denote the seven monks who died.
At Profession they placed their ‘vows’ on the altar. We have not been asked to shed our blood – they did so.
 ‘Sancta Maria–Mater Dei’. How often did they monks pray, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”.
Our Lady’s outer garment is painted brown, which denotes the earth – everyday ordinary things. Within it is yellow (as in the halo) since ‘she is all glorious within’.
Three stars, – on her head and shoulders (the Christ Child concealing the left shoulder) denote that she was a virgin before, during and after the birth of her Child.
Her inner vestment is red, denoting royalty, power, humanity which she gives to her Son, so His cloak is red.
His inner vestment is white and yellow denoting holiness and divinity.
On his right shoulder band the sun is depicts, not with  the rays shining down to the world, but back to the one who made it, acknowledging the true light of the world.
In His left hand He holds the closed scroll reminding us that the whole mystery is not yet revealed.
His right hand points towards Mary. It is a ‘blessing hand’ – blessing will come through the three fingers extended to remind us of the Trinity. (Sr. Peter)

Prayer.
Father, may the sacrifice of these friends of yours bear fruit in your Church and draw others to follow your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen           (J.M.)

k) First Anniversary
A YEAR AFTER THE A-DIEU
Monika Clare, Ireland

The 7 martyred monks of Tibhirine loved the people and the very land of Algeria to the end. Although desiring the grace of martyrdom, their Prior, D. Christian, envisaged this people’s being indiscriminately blamed for his death and found it too high a price. He would surely have us find in the death of the monks of Tibhirine a sign of peace and reconciliation, an added reason to love Algeria and the Algerians.
Before I went to Algeria for the first time about 15 years ago, an Algerian friend (a devout and somewhat “fundamentalist” Muslim) advised me “if you have any difficulties or feel frightened turn to the first man you see in the street who doesn’t look like a criminal lunatic and say ‘I am a stranger in your country, sent by God, please help me’”. I left out the bit about “sent by God”, which seemed a rather bold claim, but I suspect it went unsaid. This noble duty of chivalry towards the weak (the foreigner, the woman, the stranger) also lies at the heart of the Gospel, but would be harder to count on in most nominally Christian cities I fear.
A second vignette: when in Algiers for a medical meeting, I was told that a marvellous view was to be had from beside the basilica of “our Lady of Africa”. Learning that I was a “follower of the Messiah” (i.e. a Christian ... even if a rather poor sort), my Muslim hosts enthusiastically organised my outing. A taxi was arranged and half the neighbourhood appeared with bouquets of splendid flowers for me to take to “Myriam” with their respects. One of the daughters of the house, a chador-clad daughter of Islam, was to accompany me (the rest of the taxi being filled with flowers!) and we called first at a mosque, where hot, fragrant mint tea was served in the garden and we were given yet more flowers.
When we reached the hilltop basilica, the view was indeed splendid. The priest on duty seemed rather surprised by this eccentric “pilgrimage” - apparently a funeral cortege with no body. The traditional respect of Algerians for all who honour God, and specifically for the followers of the Messiah, had survived bitter years of colonisation, a relatively recent war of liberation and a Soviet-inspired government.
The death of these martyred monks must, as they hoped and prayed, lead us not to fear or hate the people of the land where they were cruelly killed, but to recognise them as “shining with the glory of Christ, fruit of his passion, filled with the gift of the Spirit”. After the dark days of hoping against hope that their kidnappers’ flinty hearts would be touched, confirmation that they had indeed died in witness to their faith reached us during the “glory days” at the end of the Easter and we are commemorating this anniversary in the afterglow of the glorious mysteries we celebrate at Ascension and Pentecost. The light kindled by the monks of Atlas is inseparable from it.
They remind us that we too have been baptised into Christ’s death, that in Him we too can confront evil and death (within ourselves and beyond) in the knowledge that His love has overcome them. “Peace I leave with you; my own peace I give to you. A peace the world cannot give, that is my gift to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid”.
Monastic life has always been viewed as essentially baptismal; not a vocation to “add on” some “optional extra”, but rather to plunge further into the reality of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. When lived authentically – and above all when it culminates in the “red martyrdom” of blood shed in Christ’s name– it reaches far beyond the limitations of the concrete circumstances in which it is lived. The martyrs’ witness is not to their own courage and generosity – though in human terms it is splendid to behold, and their families, compatriots and fellow Cistercians can rightly be proud of them. They witness to Christ in his dying and rising, when He stands revealed as the Son and Word of God, in whom and for whom all exists, and who died for all. Through silent prayer and intercession, they had been moulded into the pattern of Christ’s death, growing in the boundless love which lays down life itself for the life of the world. In their death the seven monks are revealed as truly children of God – his own dear sons. Like their great predecessor Ignatius of Antioch, in the fulness of life they yearned for the death by which they were to bear witness, for they too surely heard the murmuring of living water whispering within them “Come to the Father”.
In our hearts too, the Spirit cries out “Abba Father!” We too follow Jesus Christ on his journey from this world “to the Father”, and we too are invited to drink deep of the water of life. Like the first disciples, we are led out of our familiar world up to our “mount called Olivet” to see Christ taken up into glory, forced to let go of our narrow religious certainties and then, perhaps baffled and frightened, powerlessly await the unimaginable outpouring the Spirit. This self emptying, this willingness to be stripped of our reassuring illusions is a faint reflexion of the sacrifice of the martyrs and that of Christ Himself. May their example give us the courage to plunge deeper into the waters of baptism – for all who have been baptised into the death of Christ are called to follow Him through death to life. Few will be worthy to shed their blood for Him, but please God, in death we will all discover that He is indeed our Living way.
The book of Revelation describes the ultimate struggle, the Blessed acclaim the maryrs, "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah ... our brothers have conquered by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” (Rev 12).
May we too put our trust in the words of the One who was dead and now is alive, who loved us and gave himself for us and for all God’s children as He proclaims: “Behold, I make all things new, for I have conquered death. Do not fear, for I am with you to the end of time. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”



Atlas Martyrs by Donald McGlynn, ocso                                                                                    1
Chronology                                                                                                                                 2
Abduction: March 26–27, 1996                                                                                                 2
History of Cistercian Monks (Trappists) in Algeria 1843–1904, 1934–97                              7
To Remain or Not to Remain                                                                                                  10
In the Hands of the Brothers from the Mountain                                                                    12
Biographical Notes                                                                                                                   13
Fr. Christian (Christian de Chergé),                                                                                                                                13
Brother Luc (Paul Dochier),                                                                                                                                             16
Fr. Christophe (Christophe Lebreton),                                                                                                                           18
Br. Paul (Paul Favre-Miville),                                                                                                                                          19
Bellefontaine and Algeria. Three volunteers: Michel, Bruno, Célestin.                                                                   21
Br. Michel (Michel Fleury),                                                                                                                                              22
Fr. Bruno (Christian Lemarchand),                                                                                                                                23
Fr. Célestin (Célestin Ringeard),                                                                                                                                      24
Ribât and the Monks: Origins of a Spiritual Association                                                        25
The Press                                                                                                                                  27
After the Assassinations                                                                                                           29
“Seismic fault-line” —Bishop Claverie                                                                                    31
Let the voice of our martyrs resound                                                                                      33
Christian’s Testament—Authorized Version & Variants                                                       37
Testament of Fr. Christian – Commentary                                                                             38
Last Lament                                                                                                                             40
Appendix                                                                                                                                   44
I. Text of Testament of Dom Christian                                                                                   44
II. Message of John Paul II, Mass for the Martyrs of Atlas                                                   46
III. Homily – All Saints,  1996.  Abbot Etienne Baudry, Bellfontaine                                      47
IV. Message to our Christian Friends The Young Muslims’ Collective of France                 50
Supplement                                                                                                                               51
a) Atlas – Icon of our Vocation,  Archbishop Henri TEISSIER                                             51
b) Gethsemani Buddhist-Christian Encounter                                                                         55
c) Spiritual Struggle of Monks in Algeria  Abbots and Abbesses of France                            60
d) Representatives of the Muslims of France Paris, May 7th 1996                                          62
e) Tibhirine. (6 weeks after abduction)                                                                                    63
f) After Atlas Mass,Trinity Sunday 1996  St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh                          65
g) MORE ALIVE THAN EVER by Marie Romanens La Croix 29 May 1996                       67
h) Video— Atlas Presentation                                                                                                  69
i) Personality of the Year  Award,  by the Belgian Daily Newspaper                                     73
j) Icon of Sancta Maria                                                                                                            74
k) First Anniversary A YEAR AFTER THE A-DIEU Monika Clare, Ireland                         75

93 pages
30,821 words
9 Nov 07





[1]Final words of Abbot General Bernardo Olivera, OCSO, after the burial of the seven martyrs at the monastery of Our Lady Of Atlas. The events are uniquely chronicled in four major letters of Dom Bernardo to the Order: “Our Brothers of Atlas I—For a Faithful Reading of the Events” (Rome May 27, 1996; also published in L’Osservatore Romano), “Our Brothers of Atlas II—Chronicle of the Trip to Algeria” (Rome June 11, 1996), “Our Brothers of Atlas III—Radiant Witnesses of Hope: Your Story and Ours” (Rome September 12, 1996), “Our Brothers of Atlas IV —Keeping their Memory Alive” (Rome May 21 1997). INTERNET: http://www.agora.stm.it/A.Veilleux/atlas.htm
[2]Final Message of General Chapter to Nuns and Monks of the Cistercian-Trappist Order, Rome, October 1996. Fr. Jean-Pierre Schumacher, one of the survivors from Atlas, gave an address to the General Chapter: “Notre Dame de L’Atlas—Situation after the abduction (March 27) and death (May 21) of seven members of the community.”
[3]Mgr. Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers, Homily at Mass, Tre Fontane, Rome, October 10, 1996, from Internet, OCSO General Chapter Daily Reports, October 10, 1996. This Mass was the culminating tribute of remembrance of the martyrs by the Order, represented by all the members of the General Chapter; by the Church in Algeria, represented by the Archbishop of Algiers; and by the universal Church, represented by the Pope’s delegate Archbishop G. B. Re of the Vatican Secretariat of State, who read the letter of John Paul II signed from his hospital bed. L’Osservatore Romano, October 13, 1996, published the Pope’s letter and gave full coverage to this event and to the martyrs.
[4]Philippe Hémon, OCSO, “‘Vers un À-Dieu en-visagé de vous’: Témoignage personnel d’un moine sur ses frères du monastère de N.-D. de l’Atlas,” Coll 58 (1996): 230. Fr. Philippe was greatly attached to the community of Atlas. Because of his work in helping with their liturgy, he was due to visit Atlas to introduce new books for Easter and Paschal time. His journey had to be postponed, and he said, “I even think that along with Jean-Pierre and Amadeus I could well be considered as the third escapee from this tragic happening.” Similarly, the abbot of Port-du-Salut, Dom Rémy Declercq, was due to arrive at Atlas in the company of Br. Paul to preside at the election of the prior; a few days before departure, his passport visa was refused, because of a trip he had made seven years earlier to Latroun, Israel, for a centennial celebration. Thus his life was spared.
   Fr. Philippe was called upon by the Catholic daily, La Croix, by the magazine Pèlerin, etc., to provide first-hand information about Atlas. He was prompted into correspondence with the director and leader writer of Le Nouvel Observateur, who made perceptive comments and raised deep questions: “Are Christians the only ones who can be persecuted throughout the world without raising the slightest wave of indignation?” (Jacques Julliard, ed., Le Nouvel Observateur, May 30, 1996.
   Fr. Philippe has maintained a dossier of published material on the Atlas story and was kind enough to help the present writer from that resource.
[5]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas III.” The eyewitnesses wrote at the request of Dom Bernardo, who uses their account in his third letter.
[6]Minutes of the Meeting March 25-28, 1996, Journal de Ribât, no. 24 (1996).
[7]Ribât guest, personal account.
[8]See the recent study by Algerian historian Claude Garda, “Les monastères cisterciens d’Algérie,” Coll 58 (1996): 201–16.
[9]See Coll 5 (1934):172; 6 (1935): 110; 7 (1936): 178, 220. See also Mireille Duteil, Les Martyrs de Tibhirine (Paris: Éditions Brepols, 1996) 35-42. Hereafter: Les Martyrs.
[10]Coll 7 (1936): 220.
[11]Coll 7 (1936): 220, Les Martyrs 42–56.
[12]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas III.”
[13]La Croix Supplément, May 25, 26, 27, 1996.
[14]The autopsy could be made on the heads only, but the Algerian doctors estimated the time of death to correspond to the date of May 21 given in the communiqué of the GIA. The heads had been interred and then, a macabre detail, disinterred before being found exposed. The bodies have not yet been found.

[15]Short personal biographies appeared in two major French papers giving each of the seven monks a distinctive heading. La Croix, April 13, 1996, had these descriptions: Christian, “Transparent”; Luc, “Toubib”; Christophe, “Passionate”; Paul, “Self-possessed”; Michel, “Without guile”; Bruno, “Gentle and just”; Célestin, “Vibrant.” Le Nouvel Observateur, May 30, 1996, had the following: Christian, “Son of a General who preferred the poor of Algeria”; Luc, “The monk toubib who loved Piaf”; Christophe, “Student of ’68 who chose the monastery”; Paul, “Late vocation, plumber”; Michel, “He ended his letters with Inch ’Allah”; and Célestin, “He saved the life of an FLN rebel.”
[16]Recounted by Abbé Claude Bressolette, Doyen of the Theology Faculty and Religious Science of the Institute Catholique, Paris.
[17]Les Martyrs, 51.
[18]Abbé Claude Bressolette, from a personal note.
[19]See Fr. Louis Wehbé, OCSO, “Témoignage d’un moine arabe,” Coll 58 (1996): 217-23.
[20]Christian, Letter from Tibhirine, August 4, 1984. Christian mentioned to Dom John Eudes that he had a great grandmother who had American citizenship. He wrote out his adopted Arabic name, “Abdulehai Christian” and explained it as meaning “Servant of the Living One,” which is one of the ninety-nine names of God used in the Sufi prayer liturgy. (Dom John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO, personal journal).
[21]Abbé Joseph Chone, Promoter of Causes of Saints and Diocesan Archivist, Paris, from a personal note.
[22]Le Nouvel Observateur, May 30, 1996.
[23]Editorial, Journal du Ribât, no. 24 (1996).
[24]Les Martyrs, 46.
[25]Luc, letter, March 19, 1995, in Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas III,” 22.
[26]Hugues Vidor, Témoignage Chrétien 18.24 (May 1987), interview with Fr. Christophe as guestmaster at Dombes.
[27]Hugues Vidor, Témoignage Chrétien 18.24.
[28]Christophe, journal, January 30, 1996; Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas III,” 22.
[29]Based on article “Un homme de foi et de joie” by EA; publisher unknown.
[30]Paul, letter, January 11, 1995.
[31]Fax letter to the writer, January 11, 1997.
[32]Michel, letter, April 1994, in Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas III” 22.
[33]Document with Journal du Ribât, no. 24 (1996).
[34]Ribât in Diaspora, 18/19 (May 1996), Compte Rendu.
[35]The families kept attentive but quiet. They refused to play into the hands of the terrorists by appearing on television. The mother of Fr. Christophe, the youngest of the hostage monks, sharing her son’s faith and courage, said, My son was aware of precisely what the risk was. He awaited the outcome with confidence and faith. As for me, I am worried, but I wait in peace trying to be calm.
   By April 25, when Communiqué No. 43 was made known, the plight of the monks seemed to have fallen into oblivion.
[36]Dom Armand Veilleux, OCSO, L’Osservatore Romano, April 17. Dom Armand first sent out information at the request of the abbot general on March 27, giving initial information about the abduction. Thereafter, by fax and electronic mail, he kept the communities in touch with events.
[37]Le Monde, etc. See Donald McGlynn, OCSO, “Kidnapped Monks Not Forgotten,” Scottish Catholic Observer May 17, 1996. Articles in English were derived largely from the French sources. Irwin Arieff (Paris), “Condemnation for Monk’s Killers”, Herald, Glasgow, May 25, 1996. The London Tablet published reports from Robert Kelly, its Paris correspondent, on June 1 and 8, 1996. See also J. E. Bamberger, OCSO, “Seven Martyrs,” America June 22, 1996; G. Marchesi, SJ, “Martirio di Sette Monaci Trappisti,” La Civilta Cattolica July 6, 1996. In Religious Life Review (Dublin) 34-35 (July-Oct 1996), Austin Flannery, OP, reported on the assassination of the monks and Bishop Claverie. He also published Christian’s “Testament” and “Conference to the General Chapter of 1993.”
[38]La Croix, May 5, 1996, “Communiqué from the French Abbots and Abbesses.” The insinuation originating in the Algerian paper El Watan that it could only be through some complicity with the rebels that the monks had been able to stay at Tibhirine brought a quick and forceful response from the Cistercian abbots and abbesses gathered at the time for a Regional Meeting. While acknowledging the generally sympathetic reporting, they effectively put things in their true perspective. A respectful silence on the point followed during the time of anxious waiting.
[39]See Fr. Louis Wehbé, OCSO, “Témoignage d’un moine arabe,” Coll 58 (1996): 217-23.
[40]See R. Rollheiser, “Let me not miss the hour of my death,” Irish Catholic November 28, 1996 (syndicated article for similar papers); Pat O’Leary, “Martyred Cistercian predicted his death,” Irish Catholic June 6, 1996; P. Smith, “Slain Monk’s Testament Proclaims Love,” Salt Lake Tribune August 31, 1996; James Wiseman, OSB, “A Testament for All Saints Day,” Texas Catholic November 1, 1996; Barbara Mayer, OSB, “Add seven new names to the Litany of Martyrs, Intermountain Catholic January 31, 1997.
[41]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas I”: May 27, 1996.
[42]Basil Pennington, “The Cistercian Martyrs,” Review for Religious, 55 (1996): 601–12. Armand Veilleux see Supplement b). [See these articles and related material on the Internet: http://www.agora.stm.it/A.Veilleux/atlas.htm ]. Étienne Baudry, OCSO, “Vocations Vendée,” Horizons 37 (Oct-Dec 1996). Julian Doherty, ‘The Wider Horizon of the Algeria of the Heart’, CSQ Vol.32.2 1997.
[43]After the initial sensation in the media, more thoughtful articles appeared in a number of journals: Donald McGlynn, “The Martyrs of Today,” Scottish Catholic Observer, June 7, 1996; Briefing (bishops’ official documentation) 26.6 (June, 1996); Henri Tincq, “Le calvaire des [sept] de Tibéhirine” (review of known facts as more information became available), Le Monde, samedi 8 juin, 1996; Edi Duncan, “A Life for Algeria” New City 283 (Aug/Sept, 1996); Jean Daniel, “Les Sept moines de Tibhirine” (spiritual implication seen by a Jewish intellectual), La Nouvel Observateur no. 1647, 30 mai, 1996; Marie Romanens, “Plus que jamais vivants” (profound reflection on Fr. Christian’s Testament), L’Actualité dans le monde no. 146, 15 juillet, 1996. The two latter are considered in Philippe Hémon, OCSO, “Vers un À-Dieu en-visagé de vous,” Coll 58 (1996): 224–42.
In a letter to members of L’Arche/Faith and Light (August 31, 1996), Jean Vanier said:
“One of these horrors was the assassination of the seven Trappist monks in Algeria. It was also one of the most important religious events in recent years. These seven monks had deliberately chosen to remain in Algeria in spite of the risks. They wanted to be a sign of God’s love. They were not there to convert Muslims but to be a face of God’s love for each person, no matter what their political, military, or religious affiliation may be. God loves each person. These monks were men of silence. Their Trappist vocation is a vocation of silence and not of proclaiming the word.”
Rick Hampson, Associated Press, ‘Monasterybecomes resting place for monks at peace with the world’, Salt Lake City Tribune, March 30, 1997. (http://www.sltrib.com). Also as “A Testament to the Power of Love”, Toronto Star, March 30, 1997.
Bill Long, ‘Brothers of the Mountains:The Atlas Martyrs’, Spirituality, Dominican Publications, Dublin, Spring 1997.
[44]See Les Martyrs 130.
[45]Pèlerin Magazine, no. 5922 (May 31, 1996).
[46]Pèlerin Magazine, no. 5922 (May 31, 1996).
[47]Homily at Fanjeaux, Religious Life Review, Sept-Oct 1996: 281. Hereafter Fanjeaux.
[48]London Times, obituary, August 6, 1996.
[49]One hypothesis is that the abduction was a “contract job” by a band from outside the locality. Apart from the cutting of the telephone lines, the kidnappers seemed decided on the figure of seven monks to meet their contract. Once they had their hands on seven monks, they looked no further and left quickly in ignorance of the remaining two monks and the retreatants. See Henri Tincq, Le Monde 8 Juin, 1996.
[50]Various biographical details and exploits attributed to Zitouni may be found in the following publications: Les Martyrs 157, L’Express, Paris, 30 Mai au 5 Juin, 1996, London Times July 29, 1996. Djamel Zitouni, alias Abou Abderrahmane, born in the late 1960s and according to some reports assassinated July 16, 1996, was the son of a chicken salesman in the southern outskirts of Algiers. His most notorious operation was the failed hijacking of the Air France Airbus on Christmas Eve 1994. His four commandos were killed. Four White Fathers were murdered in Algeria in direct revenge.
[51]Quoted in T. Radcliffe, “A life that was given—Pierre Claverie, OP,” Religious Life Review, Sept-Oct 1996: 287.
[52]Pierre Claverie, Lettres et message d’Algérie (Éditions Karhala, 1996) 224. This book was in course of publication when Bishop Claverie was assassinated.
[53]–55Fanjeaux 281.
[54]Joe Kelly, Editor, “Words to inspire the world,” The Universe, June 27, 1996.
[55]John Moakler, OCSO, Letter, London Tablet, May 8, 1996, quoting, “Our brothers can certainly be considered martyrs” (Information Bulletin from Armand Veilleux, May 24, 1996).
[56]Le Nouvel Observateur no. 1655, 25 juillet, 1996.
[57]Les Martyrs 205.
[58]Louis Wehbé, OCSO, “Témoignage d’un moine arabe,” trans. Arlette Walls Chronique de Latroun, Supplément no. 222 (1996). See longer version in Coll 58 (1996): 217-23.
[59]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas I.”
[60]Paris: Éditions Bayard, 1996. New publications in 1997 include new documents to complement Bruno Chenu’s first collection and a new book ‘Les Vielleurs de l’Atlas’ by Robert Masson (publisher n.a.).
[61]Paris: Éditions Brepols, 1996.
[62]Mgr. Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers, had the Polish version when he met the monks and nuns of the Order at Tre Fontane on October 12, 1996. A linguist himself, he was interested in collecting the different language translations.
[63]Hallel 21 (1996).
[64]In his homily on November 1, 1996 Dom Étienne Baudry, OCSO, of Bellefontaine says: “Everything is said already in this text, which, it seems to me, dates from the initial shock on December 1 and was never corrected or touched up but was begun all over again on a deeper level on January 1. [The second stage was the result] of a sharp inner debate that led to the rediscovery or at least the revelation of a deep vocation ending in the transfiguration of his already-given forgiveness.” See Appendix III.
[65]Cf. Hallel 21 (1996): Editorial.
[66]General Chapter of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, Poyo, Spain, 1993, Minutes 28.88.
[67]John Paul II, Vita Consecrata 78 (March 1996).
[68]Cardinal Francis Arinze is president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. In his panegyric he praised Cardinal Duval and the seven Trappist monks as “devoted and faithful disciples of Jesus Christ” for their work in Catholic-Muslim dialogue.
[69]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas II.”
[70]The group of nine who went to the monastery under heavy military security included, in addition to the abbot general and Fr. Armand, Fr. Jean-Pierre, Fr. Amadeus, and three memebers of Fr. Christophe’s family.
[71]Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas II.”
[72]Cf. Hallel 21 (1966): 150–1; copyright: Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance.
[73]L’Osservatore Romano, October 13, 1996; the Mass was on October 12, 1996.
[74] Bruno CHENU, Sept vies pour Dieu et l’Algérie, textes recueillis et présentés par B. CHENU. Centurion, 1996, p. 23 - 24

Icon in honour to the Seven Atlas Monks

by Sr. Peter ocso     

1 comment:

vidor said...

bonjour
j'ai croisé Frère Christophe en 1987 quant je pigeais pour Témoignage Chrétien , une rencontre lumineuse. Frère Christophe m' avait écris au moment de son départ pour l'Atlas
je suis intéressé par le livre qui permet de reconstituer ces parcours et ces témoignages de vie et d'engagements, je n'ai jamais revu Frère Christophe. le film m a permis de comprendre de sens de sa vie au Monastère
j'ai dessiné une toile en souvenir de lui et souhaiterait l'envoyer à sa famille
suis aussi intéressé pour votre livre et soutenir sa diffusion
bien cordialement
Hugues Vidor
hugues.vidor@free.fr