A “Dining vs. Debate” approach to Islamic Relations

In 1996, Catholic Bishop Pierre Claverie of Algeria was martyred after a lifetime of serving the Christian and Muslim community in that country. Bishop Claverie was convinced that Jesus’ model for table ministry was the key to Islamic-Christian relations. A review of his biography, recently translated into English is featured below.

From John L. Allen, Jr.’s column “All Things Catholic” at www.ncrcafe.org

Bishop Pierre Claverie of Algeria: Patron for the dialogue of cultures

A perennial temptation with saints, whether of the formally canonized variety or not, is to reduce their lives to bumper stickers. Thus Mother Teresa becomes a feel-good symbol for care of the poor and sick, Oscar Romero an icon of liberation theology, and Josemaría Escrivá the face of traditional, militant Catholicism. While each of those sound-bites may capture something, none does justice to the complex figures to whom they have become attached.
In many ways, the late Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran, Algeria, who was assassinated in 1996, and whose cause for sainthood recently opened along with 18 other martyrs of a bloody civil war that left 150,000 Algerians dead, could be a prime candidate for just such a simplification.
Claverie’s death was part of the carnage created by the Islamic Salvation Front, a template for radical Islamic movements elsewhere. In that context, Claverie could seem a symbol for Christian martyrdom at the hands of jihadists, a patron saint for Catholic hawks in the “clash of civilizations.” This was a man, after all, fully aware of the peril that stalked him, who refused to walk away, saying, “I cannot abandon Algeria to the Islamists.”
On the other hand, Claverie was also a man of dialogue down to his bones; at his funeral in 1996, Algerian Muslim mourners described him as “the bishop of the Muslims too.” Hence the doves could also stake a claim to his memory, as a sort of spiritual antipode to Islamophobia and the “war on terrorism.”
Fortunately, we have a firebreak against such reductionist readings of Claverie’s life and death: the powerful new biography A Life Poured Out, written by Fr. Jean-Jacques Pérennès, a personal friend of Claverie as well as a fellow Dominican. The book has already been published in French and Arabic, and is now available in English from Orbis.
In a time when discussion of Christian/Muslim relations is dominated by ideology and abstract theological debate, Claverie represents an utterly different path: a life lived as a “guest in the house of Islam,” not blind to the challenges and never fuzzy about his Christian identity, but relentless in his commitment to friendship. Claverie’s interest was what he called the “real, living Islam,” meaning people rather than theories.
Reading Pérennès’ account, Claverie’s legacy seems to come down to this: Only from the outside can Islam seem dominated by militants on the one hand, and Western-style progressives on the other who carry little weight in the street. For those who know Islamic societies, like Claverie, it’s those in between who matter: mainstream scholars, journalists, professional groups, women’s groups, ordinary parents and workers — many devout, even traditional, Muslims, but also people of deep civility. Beyond the trauma of the present, it is with this popular Islam that hope lies, and few Catholic figures of the 20th century knew this world better, or loved it more, than Pierre Claverie.

Claverie was born in 1938 into a family of pieds-noirs, meaning French settlers in Algeria. His family had been in the country for four generations, so he felt himself fully Algerian. The greatest discovery of his life came in his 20s, when he realized that he had been living in what he called a “colonial bubble” — the majority Arabs had been essentially invisible to him, serving only as backdrop, as local color. He was dismayed that his Christian upbringing had never challenged him to step out of that bubble, to see the Arabs too as his “neighbor.”
For the rest of his life, Claverie dedicated himself to overcoming what he called “the abyss that separates us.”
As a young Dominican, Claverie studied at the order’s famed Le Saulchoir house of studies outside Paris from 1959 to 1967, where he encountered the work of towering French Dominican thinkers of his day such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar. Unlike other young priests of his generation, however, Claverie was never swept up in the revolutionary currents that would crest in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and later in the tumult of 1968. Instead, he was preparing what he would later call his “Algerian vocation.” Claverie mastered Arabic, and while he was always a pastor rather than an academic, he also acquired a deep understanding of Islamic spirituality and history.
When he returned to Algeria in 1967, the Catholic community was in many ways a shell of its former self. Most of the pieds-noirs had gone into exile in France, leaving the Catholic population dramatically reduced. In that context, Claverie and other Catholic leaders were forced to articulate a new logic for the church’s presence in an Islamic society. The option he embraced might best be described as an “apostolate of friendship.”
“One of my principal missions in Algeria,” he said, “is to establish, develop, and enrich a relationship, always, everywhere, and with everyone.” Claverie’s faith was that basic human solidarity would ultimately prove more powerful than theological divisions or historical resentments.
“I know enough Muslim friends who are also my brothers to think that Islam knows how to be tolerant, fraternal,” Claverie said. “Dialogue is a work to which we must return without pause: it alone lets us disarm the fanaticism, both our own and that of the other.”
Claverie was never one for fashionable, politically correct forms of inter-religious dialogue. He shunned large-scale Christian/Muslim meetings, feeling that the slogans such encounters tend to generate, such as that we are all “children of Abraham” and “people of the Book,” or that we all believe in the “one God,” artificially gloss over deep theological and spiritual differences.
Claverie was certainly no Pollyanna when it came to the reality of the Islamist threat, frequently denouncing “the cowardice of those who kill in the shadows.” His clear-eyed assessment led him into conflict with the Community of Sant’Egidio, an international Catholic movement known for its efforts in conflict resolution. In the mid-1990s, Sant’Egidio sponsored a “Rome Platform” for dialogue among the warring Algerian parties, including the extremists. Claverie and the other Algerian bishops felt betrayed, arguing that the negotiations lent legitimacy to forces butchering anyone who stood up for a non-Islamist state. They also struggled to explain to democratic activists in Algeria, who were laying down their lives to resist the Islamists, that the Sant’Egidio initiative did not represent the official position of the Catholic church.
Yet for all that, Claverie staked his life on two convictions: first, that a democratic, tolerant Islamic society is possible; second, that it’s better to build up alternatives than to tear down what he opposed. He worked tirelessly to foster a genuine civil society in Algeria, creating libraries for students and researchers, rehabilitation centers for the handicapped, and centers for educating women. He would not permit “our love to be extinguished despite the fury in our hearts, desiring peace and building it up in tiny steps, refusing to join the chorus of howls, and remaining free while yet in chains.”
Claverie understood the peril such a choice implied.
“Reconciliation is not a simple affair,” he wrote in 1995. “It comes at a high price. It can also involve, as it did for Jesus, being torn apart between irreconcilable opposites. An Islamist and a kafir (infidel) cannot be reconciled. So, then, what’s the choice? Well, Jesus does not choose. He says, in effect, ‘I love you all,’ and he dies.”
Those words proved chillingly prophetic. Claverie was killed on Aug. 1, 1996, just two months after the brutal beheading of seven Trappist monks in Tibhirine, Algeria. He died alongside his Muslim friend and driver, Mohamed Bouchikhi, when a bomb exploded in the bishop’s residence. As the two men lay dying, their blood mingled on the floor, offering a metaphor for their common humanity running deeper than differences of ethnicity, ideology and creed.
In the end, Claverie offers an antidote to facile theories about Islam, of whatever sort, crafted at a distance. He was an artisan of the patient, and often painful, work of building relationships, overcoming stereotypes, and confronting painful truths with both honesty and hope.