c. 1996 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) _ Here are excerpts from the final testament of Dom Christian de Cherge, OCSO, abbot of Atlas Abbey in Algeria and one of seven French Trappist monks slain by the Armed Islamic Group this spring. The testament was written in 1993, when rebels began issuing threats against foreigners and came to light shortly after de Cherge and his six colleagues were beheaded.
_ If it should happen one day … that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. … I would like them to be able to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones allowed to fall into the indifference of anonymity.
_ I could not desire such a death. … I don’t see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will be called, perhaps, the”grace of martyrdom,”to owe this to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam. I know the contempt in which Algerians taken as a whole can be engulfed. I know, too, the caricatures of Islam which encourage a certain idealism. It is too easy to give oneself a good conscience in identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.
_ This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills: Immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with Him His children of Islam as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, fruit of his Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, playing with the differences.
_ And you too, my last minute friend, who will not know what you are doing, yes, for you too I say this thank you and this”adieu”_ 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!
END RNS
