Interviewed by the ANSA news agency during his visit to Rome, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared he was ready to "fight alongside those who are working for the canonization of Cardinal Duval," the Archbishop of Algiers in the bloody years of the Algerian War (1954-62). Whoever has forgotten or has never known the history of modern Algeria might be surprised by this statement from the head of a country that is 99% Islamic, but this would be someone who does not remember who this Cardinal was: Leon Etienne Duval, the Catholic Primate of French Algeria, took the side of the Algerian people in the years of the war for decolonization, organizing humanitarian aid and denouncing the repression and torture carried out by the colonialists. His action was approved by the Holy See, which named him Cardinal in 1965. After the proclamation of Algerian independence at the price of 250,000 lives, almost all of them natives, the Christian population of Algeria, made up almost totally of the 800,000 French who since 1830 had settled on that side of the Mediterranean, dissolved like snow in the warm sun: 90% emigrated to France within a year, the others in the next decade. Duval, instead, remained, and with him half the priests and two thirds of the nuns. However, the Catholic Church did not receive much in return: the Cardinal was granted Algerian citizenship, the Church buildings and its hierarchical structure were respected. But the Constitution proclaimed that Islam was the state religion, with all that this entails in terms of limitations on religious freedom; Catholic schools and hospitals were nationalized and Algerian citizenship granted to non-Muslims in a very small number. A "victim" of this system, for example, was the Bishop of Orano, Pierre Claverie, killed along with his Muslim driver by a bomb from Islamic extremists the night between August 1 and 2, 1996.
Even though born on Algerian soil, Claverie, whose family was French, had requested Algerian citizenship in vain from 1980 onwards. "In today's Al geria," the Bishop wrote soon before his death, "religion is profoundly linked to identity: to be Algerian and be Muslim is an obvious thing. It was accepted that foreigners from Europe or elsewhere could become Algerian citizens, but this is something different: you cannot be completely Algerian unless you are also truly Muslim."

3,000 out of 30,000
Despite its courageous choice at the time of the war of independence, the Church has always been considered a foreign body, a leftover from colonization. Despite the appreciation of the government and the population for the benefits they received from the social activities and professional capacities of the clergy and the few laymen, a dialogue between Islam and Christianity has never taken place in Algeria, and until 1996, the date of the Pope's trip to Tunisia, the local media have always ignored (on orders from above) the trips made by John Paul II to Africa. Algeria has ended up as the North African country with the smallest number of Catholics: barely 3,000 out of almost 30,000,000 inhabitants, plus the constant presence of thousands foreign Catholics, for the most part students, workers, and diplomats. The priests number a total of about one hundred, nuns fewer than two hundred.
In the 1990s the situation, with the explosion of Islamic extremism, has become tragic: in the course of three years, between 1994 and 1996, 19 religious have been murdered: Christian priests, nuns, and monks, including the Bishop of Orano. The terrorists have not hesitated to raise their murderous hands against women (six nuns have been killed and one wounded) and peace-loving monks (the seven Trappists of Tibehirine whose throats were slit after being held prisoners for a month). To understand the mentality of the murderers, all one has to do is read the text issued by the extremists after their first aggression, which claimed two victims: "In the context of its policy of elimination of Jews and Christians from the land of Islam in Algeria, a commando of the GIA [the main terrorist group] has successfully laid an ambush that killed two cross-backs who had spent many years propagandizing corruption in Algeria. Subsequently all the infidel communities have rushed to condemn the action. The first to do so was the odious cross-back who runs the Vatican."

New possibilitys for dialogue
But more than a war against Jews and Christians (the one started by Islamic radicals right after the nullification of the 1991 elections and the disbanding of their party, the Islamic Salvation Front [ISF], and manipulated by the military), it is a war of a few Muslims, who believe they are the custodians of the correct interpretation of Islam, against other Muslims whom they consider heretics. One hundred thousand people have lost their lives during this war. And yet Henry Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers, detects a providential value in what is happening: "Today the reading of Islam offered by the extremists takes to their ultimate consequences some positions existing in the tradition. Thus the Muslims who reject extremism are necessarily called to a new reading of their tradition. In this way, the crisis forces the relationship between Islam and Christianity to cease being a clash that places Christians and Muslims on opposite sides. Today many Muslims feel that they are on the same side as the Christians. Together they both are becoming aware of the threats looming over the dignity of man, over respect for women, over the freedom of human communities, and finally over religion, the sense of God, and the promotion of true spiritual values."
To be sure, the tragedy has brought out the human greatness of some Christians and Muslims. The testimony of Father Christian, Prior of Tibehirine, is dumbfounding. Foreseeing what was about to happen to him, he wrote in his spiritual testament, drawn up long before he was kidnapped: "I would like, when that moment comes, to be clear minded enough to beg the pardon of God and of my brothers in humanity, and myself to pardon wholeheartedly whoever has struck me… I do not see how I could be happy about the fact that this people whom I love might be indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price, for what might perhaps be called 'the grace of martyrdom.'… And you, too, last-minute friend, who will not know what you are doing, yes, also to you I want to say 'thanks' and this 'a-dieu' which you have wanted. And may we meet again, thieves covered with joy, in Paradise if God so wills it, our Father of both of us." This same presage and the same total availability is found in the pages of the diary of Mohamed Pouchiki, Bishop Claverie's young Muslim driver: "As to all those who helped my family, that is, the fathers, nuns, and Bishop, I do not know how to thank them, except with my life and my prayers. I am ready to give my life for them, because they gave theirs for Algerians."

The life of the Christian community in one of the most secular Islamic countries. The cultural and social pressure of the Islamic religion. Arab Bishop Twal: "We are forced by circumstances to live only what is essential"

BY GIORGIO PAOLUCCI

Arab, that is Muslim. This is a stereotype profoundly rooted in the common mentality, which forgets the existence of 10 million Arab Christians between North Africa and the Middle East. It is a common place that in the Maghreb countries has the value practically of a postulate, something that has been so completely accepted that it cannot be put into discussion. Thus you can imagine the astonishment of Tunisians when they witnessed the arrival in their capital (in 1992) of Fouad Twal, the first Arab Bishop in centuries to guide a North African diocese and successor to the French prelates who had so generously administrated the diocese. This was yet one more prophetic choice on the part of John Paul II, who wished in this way to emphasize what a great debt the Church owes to the Arab Christians who for centuries have constituted an important resource for Christianity and who still today represent a bridge of primary importance between Islam and the West.

A "multinational" community
A true Arab, proud of belonging to a centuries-old tradition, a descendant of the Bedouin tribe of Al Ozeisat who from the first century embraced the Christian faith, Twal leads a community of 22,000 believers out of a total population of 9,000,000 people: religious personnel, foreign workers for branch offices of their company, as well as a small core of French and Italian "survivors" of the colonial period. This is a community small in size but that, also because of its "multinational" composition, lives the universal dimension of the Church, without forgetting the significance of its presence in an Arab-Muslim context, in three different dimensions: witness, service, dialogue.
Some social and educational projects are the most visible form of witness and service. After the proclamation of independence from France in 1956, the diocese had to cede to the state 95% of its property, keeping five churches and a few other structures: the St. Augustine clinic, the first private structure founded in Tunis in 1933; fifteen schools of various levels directed in part by religious congregations and attended almost exclusively by young Tunisians; and some libraries spread throughout the poor neighborhoods of the capital city. These are not great initiatives, but are the efficacious signs of a task, as Twal himself states: "We are there for a mission, not because of some unlucky fate; a mission to carry out the plan of Another, this mysterious and infinite Other who gave life to me and who is my, our Father in every moment."

A historical necessity
Even if Tunisia is considered one of the most "secular" Islamic countries and among those most open to modernity (polygamy was abolished by the first President Burghiba, women's emancipation has obtained significant results, obligatory schooling has been raised-for some time now-to 16 years of age), the pressure exerted by Islam on the social and cultural plane remains very strong. What does it mean in an environment like this to practice inter-religious dialogue? Bishop Twal emphasizes first of all that "God has wanted us to be Christians in the Islamic world and for the Islamic world. For the majority of us this means to accept our calling as a small flock, vulnerable but faithful. We are led by circumstances to prune our presence of all that is not fundamental and to live only what is essential, conscious however of the fact that if God wanted us here, it is not in order to undergo hardship nor to give in to fear and be relegated to the edge of things. Jesus said, "Do not be afraid, trust, because I have won the world." Dialogue, more than a theoretical option, appears to be a necessity dictated by history, which must be lived without inferiority complexes and in mutual truth, in Africa as in the West. It will be more fruitful in the degree to which the Catholics who undertake it are conscious of their task." As Cardinal Arinze, responsible for the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, said recently, "Those who want to hide or muffle their identity, give the impression of saying implicitly that Christ is an obstacle or an embarrassment in the dialogue," rather than a precious resource on which to base their presence. And the small flock led by Twal is ever more aware of this.

BY GIUSEPPE FIDELIBUS

Augustine was on his deathbed. All around him were the friends who had shared with the great Bishop of Hippo (now an area near the city of Annaba, the ancient Bona in Numidia), first, the long road in search of the Truth that culminated in the encounter with the man Jesus. And then, above all, mutual friendship in impassioned service to the Church. He was watching his city under siege by barbarians. And he was thinking about his 35 years of service as Bishop, and about the reflourishing that through him and his friends had come about in Africa. After his conversion, Augustine had returned to his fatherland to live only "for God." Some friends had immediately joined him because they recognized in unity and friendship the method for properly living the Christian experience they had just encountered. Once he became a priest and then Bishop of Hippo (the second most important and populous city in proconsular Africa), Augustine never ceased to give priority to the common life as method and source even of his own very intense pastoral activity. Around him and his "monastery of clergymen," all the Church in North Africa flourished again; he himself is the one who testifies to this-vitality of the African Church, especially in his discourses and letters. This Church was strongly aware of the richness of its tradition founded on the blood and witness of martyrs (as early as 180 A.D. We have a Passion of Christians who died professing the faith in the city of Scilium), culminating in the great figure of St. Ciprian, Bishop of Carthage, who gave his life for Christ in the persecution of 258 A.D. under Emperor Valerian. The life of the community was fervent, especially in the city. In this period in the city of Carthage alone there were ten basilicas always full of faithful who came especially to hear the Bishop of Hippo who was often present for the liturgy in the metropolitan seat. There were fewer in the countryside, where Augustine's zeal for evangelization became more intense: "Here in Africa there are countless tribes of barbarians to whom the Gospel has not yet been preached… some of them who live in regions of the interior and are not subjected to the dominion of Rome have no contact with the Christian religion, but this absolutely does not mean that they do not belong to God's promise." (Augustine, Epistle 199, 12, 46, written around 420). Besides him, there were numerous bishops (already in 220 there were about 80 bishops; by the beginning of the fifth century, in Augustine's time, they had grown to around 500 in all of proconsular Africa, with their institutional referent the metropolitan see of Carthage and their authoritative father the Bishop of Hippo). These bishops were often from his monastery of the clergy (a sort of priestly fraternity ante litteram with their own rule; cf. his sermons nos. 355-356-delivered in 426 when Augustine was already more than 70 years old-in which he speaks of the common life in the "House" in Hippo).They were friends with each other, and their theology was secure in a time when heresy was dominant, all of them imbued with disinterested dedication to the service of the Church. But above all, there was a people. To be sure, they were not perfect (Augustine had to strongly reprimand his parishioners who had lynched an unfair official), but certainly they were attached to their Bishop and careful to follow his example and teachings, which were not intended to be obeyed blindly but instead to be examined, their reasons understood: "… we do not worry because we follow our Bishop, they say… bad reasoning (Augustine answers)… because there are bishops also among the heretics. Those who throw themselves into the jaws of the wolf will be devoured. The bad shepherds will have their hide. I have to seek the living sheep. What good does it do to bring back their carcass?" (Augustine, sermon 46, 21). A bishop for them and a Christian like them, one who makes attraction to the individual person the center of what he proposes. And in this way he builds a people: "Every man goes and seeks. What does he seek? He seeks rest, he seeks happiness. There is no one who is not seeking happiness. Ask a man what he desires and he will tell you that he seeks happiness. But men do not know either the road that leads there nor how to find it. They wander here and there. Christ has put us back on the right path, the one that leads to the fatherland. How to walk on it? Love, and you will run. The more you love, the faster you will run towards the fatherland." (Augustine, sermon 346/B, 2)