Message from the past

In March 1996, seven Catholic monks in Algeria were kidnapped and murdered by Muslim terrorists. The occasion of the tenth anniversary of their deaths carries some lessons it would be valuable to reflect on amid another anniversary: three years since the invasion of Iraq...three years of witnessing some Muslims attacking mosques, Red Cross centers, UN offices, Christian churches and other places...three years of sorrow and death.

The lessons come from one of the monks: a French Trappist named Father Christian-Marie de Cherge. Months before his murder, he penned a letter, thinking that he might be killed because other Catholic missionaries had been slain. He noted on the envelope that his letter should be opened only if he was slain.

"I would like my community, my Church, my family to remember that my life was given to God and to this country [Algeria]," he wrote, and "that they pray for me,...that they understand that such a death should be linked to so many others, equally violent, but which remain masked by the anonymity of indifference. My life has no greater worth than that of another. Nor is it worth any less."

At the moment of his death, he continued, "I would like to have enough lucidity left to beg God's pardon and that of my all my fellow human beings, while pardoning with all my heart anyone who might have hurt me....I do not see how I could rejoice that this people that I love should be globally blamed for my murder.

"I know...the caricature of Islam that is fostered by a certain Islamism. It is all too easy to appease one's conscience by simply identifying this religious tradition with the all-or-nothingness of the extremists. For me, Islam...is something different; it is body and soul...."

If he were murdered, Father de Cherge concluded, "at last, my pounding curiosity will be satisfied. For then I shall be able, if it pleases God,...to contemplate with Him His Islamic children as He sees them...."

(3/23/06)