Pierre Claverie

Pierre Claverie was born in 1938 in Algiers, in then French Algeria, to a family of European Catholic settlers, the community known as pieds-noirs. He later wrote that he had grown up inside a colonial bubble, almost without real relationships with the Muslim majority that surrounded him. After schooling in Algeria he went to metropolitan France. In the late 1950s he entered the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) and received the usual Dominican formation in philosophy and theology. He was ordained a priest in the 1960s. The Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and the subsequent exodus of most of the European population formed the backdrop of his youth and of his decision, unusual among pieds-noirs, to bind his life to the new Algerian republic.

He returned to Algeria after independence and set himself to learn Arabic and to study Islam, seeking the language and the religious culture of the society in which the Church now lived as a tiny minority. He worked in Algiers in Dominican houses of study and in centers devoted to language and to Christian-Muslim encounter, and he became known as a preacher and writer who refused both nostalgia for colonial Christianity and any posture of superiority. In 1981 he was named bishop of Oran. The diocese was small: a handful of parishes, remaining Europeans, African students, and migrant workers. Claverie presented the Church as a Church of encounter, present among Muslims as a friend and guest, not as a rival community or a foreign enclave. He took part in the life of the Algerian episcopal conference and spoke often of a Church living face to face with Muslim neighbors.

From 1991 Algeria descended into a civil war in which Islamist insurgents, and also elements of a harsh state response, killed tens of thousands. Foreigners, journalists, intellectuals, and Christian religious were targeted. The murder of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine in 1996 became internationally known; other sisters and priests died in the same years. Claverie declined to leave. He argued that departure would mean abandoning Algerian friends and emptying the Gospel of its meaning in that place. He continued to appear in public, to write, and to receive visitors. On 1 August 1996 a bomb was detonated at the gate of the bishop's residence in Oran just as he and his driver, Mohamed Bouchikhi, a Muslim, were going in. Both men were killed. The attack was attributed to armed Islamist groups active in the Oran region.

Claverie's homilies, interviews, and essays, collected after his death, describe a spirituality of risk, of language-learning, and of remaining. He is one of the nineteen Catholics killed in Algeria in the 1990s who were beatified as martyrs. Pope Francis approved the beatification, which was celebrated in Oran on 8 December 2018, with Algerian civil and Muslim figures present. Claverie is remembered as a Dominican bishop of pied-noir origin who claimed Algeria as his own country and who died there with a Muslim colleague, a symbol of the dialogue he had preached.