No Martyrs, No Christianity

On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Conscripts Us into Conflict

Pentecost

His mother learned of his martyrdom on Pentecost.

Father Christian de Cherge was a French Catholic monk and the prior in charge of the Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. He was beautified four years ago.

Christian De Cherge had served in Algerian as an officer in the French army during the Algerian War and, shortly after his ordination to the priesthood in 1964, he returned to the country to minister from the little abbey to the poor, mostly Muslim community of Tibhirine. De Cherge’s father viewed his son’s vocation with unmeasured disappointment. After all, their son was brilliant. He’d graduated at the top of his class and his future could have been bright, pursuing any career he chose.

Instead de Cherge felt called.

Along with his fellow monks, de Cherge toiled in relative obscurity for three decades, winning the trust of the poor and befriending leaders in the local Islamic government. When Islamic radicalism spread to Algeria in the early 1990’s, to the consternation of their superiors in Rome and to the anger of their families in Paris, de Cherge and his fellow monks refused to leave their monastery, because they refused to cease serving the community’s poor. To meet a violent end, they knew, might simply be the consequence of constancy to the Lord who had called them to such a place.

On January 1, 1994 a premonition came over de Cherge, a vision of his own impending murder. Indeed he and seven of his brothers from the Abbey were kidnapped and eventually beheaded by terrorists calling themselves the Armed Islamic Group. Anticipating his own murder, Christian composed a final testament and posted it to his family to be read upon his death.