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Viewing entries tagged with 'martyr'
July 2011
Earlier this year I went to a screening of Of Gods and Men (director Xavier Beauvois). I thought it was quite simply one of the most moving films I had ever seen. It seems that quite a number of distinguished film critics may have felt the same. At any rate it won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival last year. It tells the true story of a small group of Cistercian monks living and working in Algeria at the abbey of Tibhirine in the Atlas Mountains and the martyrdom of most of them in the one incident at the hands of Islamist extremists in 1996, during a bloody civil war.
During my recent stay in Melbourne I came across a little booklet published by the Catholic Truth Society, The Atlas Martyrs (Aus$7.50), which tells the same story. The booklet provides a great deal of background that wasn’t in the film. Authored by Jean Olwen Maynard it is a great little publication, really well written, and taking great pains to spell out that Christians were certainly not the only Martyrs in Algeria during this period. It notes that many thousands of ordinary Muslim Algerians were also slain, including at least fifty imams who refused to give their moral support to the extremists ‘religious war.
The booklet focuses particularly on the prior of Tibhirine, Christian de Cherge, a highly educated man who loved both Islam and the Algerians. It concludes with his last testament, written a few years before he was taken away to his death and in the full knowledge of what could well happen. I suspect it will come to be regarded as a religious classic. It is a remarkable document, which he concludes by addressing his future murderer:
And to you also, my friend of the final moment, who will not know what you are doing, Yes, for you too I say this THANK YOU AND THIS “A-DIEU”-—to commend you to this God in whose face I see yours. And may we find each other, happy “good thieves” in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both, Amen! (In sha’ Allah)
Various translations of the testament in full (it is quite short – was typed on just the one page) can be accessed online by googling ‘Christian de Cherge testament’. I suspect we’ll hear a lot more of it. A campaign aiming at the eventual canonisation of the Atlas Martyrs has been launched and apparently has a great deal of support.