MISSION
ALGERIA

A presence in
the DESERT
He followed the Synod from an oasis in the Sahara, where, without parish or faithful, he says Mass in the oil fields. A lifetime
PIME missionary, Fr. SILVANO ZOCCARATO is beginning the Year of Faith among Berbers and Tuaregs. “They remind me that man cannot live without God,” he says.

by Alessandra Stoppa

Touggourt, an oasis in the Algerian desert that has become a city of 50,000 Berber and Tuareg inhabitants, is surrounded by sand and rock for miles. Fr. Silvano Zoccarato is in front of the tavern where he has just eaten a workingman’s meal that cost 70 dinars–not quite a dollar. He looks at the thermometer: 115 degrees. “Sabrun bab ge’na,” he smiles. “Patience is the gate to Paradise.” His friends in Italy often ask him what in the world he is doing there. “I often ask myself the same thing.”
In considering an answer, this PIME missionary, Padovan by birth, but raised in Treviso, tells me about the day he arrived. In the little church that was no longer a church–the door had a red moon on it and the building hosted a Muslim association–a space had been reserved for him to pray, and a lit lamp was there awaiting him. “Very proud of myself, I said, ‘Jesus, I left Cameroon and now I am here for You.’ But right after, I seemed to hear, ‘I am the One who is here for you.’”
In 2006, after over 30 years of mission in the forests and savannas of Cameroon, he read an announcement by his missionary institute: “We are thinking of establishing a presence in Algeria, and three people are needed: a 70-year-old, a 50-year-old, and a 30-year-old.” He went to the Vicar General and said, “I’m the 70-year-old.” He departed for Algeria, the first and only to answer the request, and six years later, he is still the only one. He is in the middle of the Sahara Desert, where, thanks to television, he has been able to follow the October Synod, getting excited about the Year of Faith desired by the Pope. “It’s about finding Jesus again!” He jumped up from his seat when he heard one of the Synod speakers talk about mission with these words: “The Church is witness to the work of God among men and the Spirit gives her the ability to marvel at the faith of the other.”

Greetings and flies. It is clear why he was so struck by the statement, because he speaks with the same wonder about the people around him, and is full of questions. “The Muslim man who keeps my house clean knows how to do everything. He loves my person, my presence. He loves the sisters like his family... I observe his life. He is joyful. Who is God for him? What is the Church for him? And that mother who has five handicapped children? Every day she bathes them, feeds them, and serves them. Where does she find the strength?” One thinks of the new evangelization, the theme of the Synod, in terms of far-off lands, and he certainly is far-off, but when he speaks about it, that is not what he has in mind. “New evangelization is what Jesus did: He involved people and let Himself become involved with them. His disciples learned from Him the passion of living life in communion. Think of how He let Himself become involved through the sensitivity of His mother, when she asked Him to help the bride and groom in Cana. And how He involved Himself with others, to the point that He said, “Never have I found such great faith.”
When Fr. Silvano first set foot in Algiers, it did not seem like Africa at all to him; it was more like Genoa or Marseilles. But his mission was not to stay there; he went to Touggourt, about 10 hours by bus from the capital, 180 miles of plains and hills with oranges and vineyards, then another 180 of desert. Only close to the oil fields does the landscape change, with electricity towers and gas and petroleum pipelines, an area marked by huge black clouds and the air dense with burned diesel. “Last Christmas, I travelled by small plane to celebrate Mass at an oil field and, for a hundred or more miles, I did not see one person in the desert. By now, the nomads of this zone are all citizens, except for a few small, spread-out groups.”
He spent the first three months in Wargla, about 180 miles from Touggourt, where he followed, step by step, the life of the White Fathers, a congregation of missionaries born in Algeria itself. At the age of 70, he had 100 days of deep and vital “novitiate.” “Drop by drop,” he says, “it was better than university courses: prayer, meals, Arabic lessons, and kitchen, cleaning, and laundry shifts. Everything with them.” At Mass, the only attendees were two Franciscan sisters. This place has nowhere near the crowds of Christians of Cameroon, and is nothing like even the churches of the Middle East. In all of Algeria, there are only a few thousand foreign Christians and a score of Algerian ones. Where he lives, the people are all Muslims, practicing or less so, except for the Kharigites and Mozabites, the sects of the sedentary Berbers. The person who showed him the road was the Archbishop Emeritus of Algiers, Henri Teissier: “It is not enough to love the Church of Algeria. Algeria must be loved, and thus the Algerians. You love Algeria in the people you meet.” Loving is knowing, in the details.
“For example, greeting is fundamental. It has opened a relation that is vaster every day.” His encounters always happen on the sidewalk. “From the very first days, I greeted everyone, except for women, following the advice I had been given, but even in this, there is a certain progress...” Now he is even greeted by the girls who go to his house to do homework, and the mothers who accompany them, and he continues to be careful, and to follow, and change. He used to conduct wholesale slaughter of house flies, especially when he had guests, but now he no longer kills them. “I saw a child delicately flick away the fly on his hand. I understood that violent gestures against animals are displeasing.”

“And you, do you pray?” During Ramadan, he tries not to let cooking aromas leave his kitchen. He notices the mother at the threshold of her house who, when he passes, touches her son to greet him. Another woman has come every morning for years to have him count her drops of medicine. He tarries with the old people who tell him, “Come here, stay a while with us.” This lifetime missionary does not settle for tranquility, and he asks himself, “What communion do I live with them?” Surrounded by the voice of the muezzin who calls the faithful to prayer every Friday, he walks in the midst of a neighborhood that suddenly stops, with everyone kneeling, and again a question bores into him: “What am I doing here?” “The longer I stay here, the more I ask what already unites us, even if it remains veiled, prudent, but in expectation. I feel called to pursue how much there already is in me, in my being Christian.” There is even someone who dares to ask him affectionately, “And you, do you pray?” “They tell me over and over that man cannot live without God. Prayer is the most beautiful thing in life.”
At times, he goes to celebrate Mass for the technicians of the petroleum companies at the Hassi Messaud base, 110 miles from Touggourt, in the little church of Our Lady of the Sands. On the altar, he found a prayer: “We are men made arid in our sentiments, by the distance from our loved ones. Blessed Lady, cover us and our families with your mantle of blessing. Protect us and help us persevere in the faith.” He returns home, greets Jesus in the tabernacle, “alone like me,” and continues, in silence, to support the presence of the Church which has remained here, even in the hardest times of the 1990s and the massacres, “when the Muslim women kept watch so that the missionaries and sisters could sleep in peace and not consider leaving.”
The Little Sisters of Jesus have been in Algeria for 73 years and have never left. “Celebrating Mass with them is the most beautiful moment of the day,” says Fr. Silvano. Blessed Giovanni Mazzucconi, the first PIME martyr, told a friend who asked him what he did all day, “I celebrate Mass.” He wrote in a letter: “A priest who says Mass must never, absolutely cannot, feel sadness.” Fr. Silvano says that being with the Little Sisters is an unmerited privilege. “They are mothers of the people here, even of the nomads. At least 10,000 babies were born in their hands. For them, too, the celebration is the moment when they find again the beginning and the meaning of their vocation. I follow them, moved, when they recite the prayer after Communion: ‘Lord, receive the offering of my life as immolation for my brothers and sisters of Islam and of the entire world.’”
His thoughts go to Tibhirine. Fr. Silvano recently travelled to the monastery on the high plain of Atlas, known to the world because of the film Of Gods and Men, the story of the seven monks kidnapped and killed in 1996. In his blog, he wrote, “They are still alive.” The monastery is just a small remnant, a somewhat aged building and a very small cemetery, but with the power of a sign of the Spirit for the whole Church. “I went to visit Fr. Jean-Marie Lassausse, who has been entrusted with the site since 2001. With him are two Algerian workers from the village, Youssef and Samir, and then Hubert and Anne, a deacon and his wife who will dedicate two years of their life there.” There one finds the room of the prior, Fr. Christian de Chergé, that of the other martyrs, the small medical dispensary of Dr. Luc, the place where the sick Algerians waited, the large garden, and the church where the monks prayed seven times a day, up to the final moments before the kidnapping.

The moon and the Cross. Fr. Lassausse wrote in The Gardener of Tibhirine: “A bit at a time, I work hard to understand everything that has been experienced here, not to become the custodian of a museum or caretaker of a memory, but to be the successor of an extraordinary presence in this small mountain village overwhelmed by events.” He added, “I want to live, simply experiencing, as Fr. Christian summarizes it, “the profound joy of remaining with no other responsibility than that of welcoming daily life as a gift of God.” He has settled in the custodian’s old house, and passes his days on the tractor, among the flock, and sowing in the fields. “Tibhirine means ‘garden’ in the Berber language,” he said, continuing, “The seasons here are inclement. Putting roots in this land of Algeria demands, I admit, a lot of patience. But I feel that the adventure is not in vain. Mysteriously, soundlessly, in the secret of hearts and encounters, this garden, irrigated by the blood of the martyr monks, flowers again.”
Mysteriously, soundlessly. It is the same for Fr. Silvano in Touggourt, celebrating Mass alone, for weeks at a time, in that corner of the former church where women and girls learn to sew traditional clothes. But the Cross is still on the dome, small, and a bit bent. It had been taken down for repairs and left aside, but the neighbors wanted it back up there. “Maybe one day the church will return to welcoming Christians and those who are such in their hearts–they are more numerous than it seems,” says Fr. Silvano. “When I come back to the house, I look at it, and my hope grows.”