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Biography

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Paul Dochier, known in religion as Brother Luc, was born in 1914 at Bourg-de-Péage in the Drôme department of southeastern France. He studied medicine and qualified as a physician. Mobilized at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner in 1940. After his release he entered the Trappist abbey of Notre-Dame d'Aiguebelle in 1941. In 1946 he was sent to the Cistercian monastery of Notre-Dame de l'Atlas at Tibhirine in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, then still under French administration. He would remain there for the rest of his life, taking the religious name Luc.

At Tibhirine, Brother Luc served as infirmarian to the monks and, above all, as a physician to the surrounding rural Muslim population. He kept a simple dispensary and over several decades treated thousands of local patients, often with scarce medicines and at irregular hours. Those who knew him described a brusque, stubborn temperament joined to unsparing availability. During the Algerian War of Independence he was abducted in 1959 by nationalist fighters and later released; the episode did not lead him to leave Algeria after independence in 1962. He continued his medical work through the following decades among villagers who regarded him as their doctor.

In the 1990s Algeria was convulsed by a civil war in which armed Islamist groups targeted foreigners, intellectuals, and Christian clergy and religious. After communal discernment the monks of Tibhirine chose to remain with their neighbors rather than withdraw to France. Brother Luc, by then elderly and in poor health, went on seeing patients. On the night of 26–27 March 1996 armed men entered the monastery and abducted seven monks, including Brother Luc. Their deaths were later announced; the monks' severed heads were recovered in May 1996 near Médéa. Their bodies have never been found. A communiqué of the Armed Islamic Group claimed responsibility, though later inquiries have left some circumstances of the crime disputed among historians.

Together with other clergy and religious killed in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, the seven monks of Tibhirine were beatified as the Martyrs of Algeria on 8 December 2018 at Oran. The group is commemorated liturgically on 8 May. Brother Luc is remembered as the physician-monk whose long service among the poor of the Atlas expressed the community's choice of presence and friendship with Muslim neighbors, a choice sealed by martyrdom. Wider public attention to the Tibhirine community, and to his place in it, followed the 2010 film Des hommes et des dieux.

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