Odette Prévost

Odette Prévost was a French Roman Catholic religious sister of the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, a congregation inspired by the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld. She was born on 17 July 1932 in Paris. After training and working as a teacher, she entered that congregation, which had been founded in the 1930s to live among the poor in the spirit of Nazareth as Foucauld conceived it: small fraternities, ordinary work, and friendship with neighbors rather than institutional display or aggressive proselytism. She made religious profession in this community and was later sent to North Africa.

In Algeria she lived in a modest fraternity in a densely populated, largely Muslim working-class district of Algiers known as Belcourt (later Mohamed Belouizdad). There she shared the daily conditions of her neighbors, taught, and took part in literacy and educational work. Consistent with Foucauldian practice, she learned Arabic and showed respect for Islam, including study of the Quran, in order to understand those among whom she lived. Her presence was meant to be one of quiet Christian witness, prayer, and human solidarity.

The Algerian Civil War of the 1990s brought extreme violence from armed Islamist groups as well as from state forces. Foreigners, intellectuals, journalists, and Christian religious were among those targeted. Despite the danger, and contrary to advice that communities might leave, many Catholic sisters and priests chose to remain with the Algerian people. On 10 November 1995, while going to Mass in Algiers, Sister Odette Prévost was shot and killed. She was sixty-three years old. Her murder formed part of a sequence of killings of Catholic religious in Algeria between 1994 and 1996.

Together with eighteen companions—among them the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran, and members of several other congregations—she was recognized as a martyr killed in hatred of the faith. Pope Francis authorized their beatification, celebrated on 8 December 2018 in Oran, Algeria, with Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu presiding as papal legate. The group is known as the Martyrs of Algeria; their liturgical memorial is observed on 8 May. Prévost has not been canonized. Her life is remembered for long, unspectacular fidelity to a hidden life among Muslim neighbors and for remaining in Algeria when remaining had become deadly.