Tibhirine Monks

Life and Ministry

The Cistercian monastery of Notre-Dame de l'Atlas at Tibhirine, in a remote village ninety kilometers south of Algiers in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, had stood since 1938 — a small French Trappist house living quietly alongside the Muslim village whose name it shared. By the early 1990s the community numbered nine monks. Their prior was Christian de Chergé, a former French Army officer who had served in Algeria during the war of independence and had been saved during that war by an Algerian Muslim friend who was killed defending him. De Chergé had returned to Algeria as a monk specifically to live in respectful Christian witness alongside the Muslim community that had given him his life. The community ran a small clinic that treated the village's poor without payment; their daily routine was the seven Trappist offices, manual work, and silence. When the Algerian civil war broke out in 1991 between the secular government and Islamist insurgents, the community decided to remain.

Circumstances of Death

On the night of March 26, 1996, a unit of perhaps twenty armed men identifying themselves as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) entered the monastery and abducted seven of the nine monks. The two who were not taken — Jean-Pierre Schumacher and Amédée Noto — were the porters and were missed in the dark. The seven hostages were Christian de Chergé (the prior), Christophe Lebreton, Luc Dochier (the doctor), Bruno Lemarchand, Célestin Ringeard, Michel Fleury, and Paul Favre-Miville. The GIA demanded a prisoner exchange with the French government. After fifty-six days of captivity their deaths were announced on May 21, 1996; the heads were recovered, the bodies never. The GIA's communiqué claimed responsibility, though subsequent French and Algerian investigations have raised credible questions about whether the killings were carried out by the GIA or by the Algerian military in a botched rescue. The truth has not been definitively established.

Legacy

Christian de Chergé had written a testament a year before his death, sealed and given to his family in case of what he called the "GIA hypothesis," and opened only after his confirmed killing. The text — addressed to "you, friend of my final moment, who would not have known what you were doing" — and offering forgiveness in advance to his eventual killer became one of the most widely circulated Christian texts of the late twentieth century. The community's life and death is the subject of the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. The two surviving monks rebuilt a small Trappist presence in the Atlas region. The seven were beatified together by Pope Francis in December 2018 alongside other Algerian martyrs of the civil war.