The connection between religion and violence has long been seen as a political and sociological certainty. In recent decades, particularly after the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution and the September 11, 2001 attacks, religions have returned to the center of the international political stage, and not always for the right reasons. Examples abound: conflicts in Bosnia, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sudan; as well as violent Islamism, Hindu nationalism, the Christian Evangelical right, and extremist Jewish parties. The return of religion to international politics has been linked to the broader theme of identity politics. Religions have often been considered an emblematic case of the encroachment of irrationality into international security.
However, that’s only part of the story.
In many religious traditions, we find the same fundamental idea of universal brotherhood or the human family, which is all too hastily dismissed as a mere ethical aspiration, irrelevant to the international order and incapable of influencing the adoption of policies shaped by power asymmetries and economic interests. Instead, there are many ways in which religions develop pragmatic, proactive, and creative paths to combine justice, community, and dialogue in international relations. In the Mediterranean, in particular, they can offer an alternative to the political narrative that has long been dominant in the region: that of the clash of civilizations or intractable conflicts.
An example can illuminate this relatively neglected constructive potential of religions to mend fractures and heal deep social wounds. In February 2018, Pope Francis issued the decree of beatification for Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran and 18 other priests, monks, and nuns who were killed during the civil war that wreaked havoc in Algeria in the 1990s, causing at least 150,000 casualties among the Algerian population. Among these, the story of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine, who were kidnapped and killed in March 1996, is well known.
That “black decade,” as it’s known in Algeria, began in January 1992 when the army—the effective center of power since independence in 1962—cancelled the first round of the country’s first multi-party legislative elections to prevent a likely Islamist victory. This coup d’état—because that’s what it was—triggered a violent insurgency, which in turn degenerated into a brutal civil war. Therefore, the root of that conflict can be traced to an act of force, a reckless political decision, and not simply to a fundamentalist turn in Algerian society. Blame must thus be shared between an irresponsible and authoritarian political class and, to an immeasurably greater extent, an Islamist opposition that had no qualms about resorting to large-scale murderous terrorism.
At the end of that decade of terror, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who became president in 1999 (and was forced to leave office twenty years later, in 2019, after a series of massive public protests), presented a controversial platform of supposed national reconciliation.
At the end of civil or internal conflicts, some countries have historically chosen to first give room to truth, as in the case of South Africa, or negotiations, as in Colombia, before embarking on a path of justice as a prerequisite for reconciliation. In Algeria, on the contrary, the texts that introduced a substantial “bilateral” amnesty (Islamists on one side, vigilante “patriots” and special forces on the other) were adopted without parliamentary discussion or public debate, skipping both the truth and justice (especially restorative) phases.
Against this complex backdrop, in celebrating its martyrs, the Algerian Catholic Church managed the narrative of the event with great care and wisdom.
In his message for the beatification event, Pope Francis expressed his “fraternal encouragement that this celebration may help heal the wounds of the past and create a new dynamic of encounter and of living together in the following of our Blessed.” Bergoglio highlighted that “the Catholics of Algeria and the world want to… include in their prayer all the sons and daughters of Algeria who, like the martyrs, became victims of the same violence for having lived with respect for others and fidelity toward their duties as believers and citizens in this blessed land. It is also for them that we raise our prayer and express our grateful tribute.” Finally, Pope Francis concluded, “by beatifying our nineteen brothers and sisters, the Church wishes to witness to her desire to continue to work for dialogue, harmony, and friendship. We believe that this unprecedented event in the country will draw in the Algerian sky a great sign of brotherhood addressed to the whole world.” This magnificent image of “a great sign of brotherhood in the Algerian sky” immediately became a headline in bold letters across the local press. In a way, it was a smaller-scale substitute for the unfinished national reconciliation.
The Algerian Catholic Church, for its part, was careful to highlight in greater detail the inclusive nature of the decision to proceed with the beatification on Algerian soil, clarifying that “our brothers and sisters would not have accepted being separated from those with whom they shared their lives. They are witnesses to a fraternity without borders, to a love that does not discriminate. It is for this reason that their death sheds light on the martyrdom of many others—Algerians, Muslims, seekers of meaning who, working for peace and persecuted for their sense of justice, generous men and women, remained faithful to the point of sacrificing their lives during the black decade that bloodied Algeria. (…) Among them, we remember the 99 imams who lost their lives for refusing to justify violence.” Precisely on the occasion of the beatification in Oran, bishops and imams, after the reading of the Surah Maryam, gave speeches in the great Ben Badis Mosque that focused on the keywords of peace, harmony, and coexistence.
Such gestures and declarations are not a straightforward exercise in political correctness, nor can they be read, reductively, as acts of prudence on the part of a religious minority (the Catholic one in Algeria). Rather, they represent a fundamental paradigm shift: the move from a Eurocentric and hegemonic concept of religion (Catholic), to an authentic postcolonial attitude of reflexive inculturation.
It was precisely the Algerian Catholics who chose to remain in the country after independence, and even more so the monks of Tibhirine, who continued, at the cost of their lives, the “liberation” of Algerian Catholicism—which had been linked to French colonization for 130 years—by choosing to stay in Algeria despite the grave and evident risks posed by Islamist terrorism. These were, in fact, targeted murders, even though the perpetrators were an absolute minority of violent fundamentalists within Algerian society; because in general, Christians, especially those who worked on a social level, were very much loved and even protected by the people in the context where they carried out their work. It is important to remember that the prior of Tibhirine, Christian de Chergé, had founded the Ribat al-Salam, a discussion group with some Muslims, whose name means “bond of peace.”
The crucial question, raised by the then Bishop of Algiers, Henri Teissier, posed to all communities and religious figures, thus became, “Should we stay or should we go?” Faced with the strong—and well-founded—fear of literally being targeted, Teissier and the overwhelming majority of religious figures in Algeria were paradoxically strengthened in their sense of loyalty. “We are in Algeria,” Teissier declared in an interview with Giuliano Vallotto for Missione Oggi in February 1995, “out of loyalty to a people, the Algerian people. How could we abandon our Algerian friends in their time of danger? To stay is in the logic of our vocation […]. We were sent by the Church to this Muslim country to be close to our brothers and sisters in humanity: we want to express in our lives the Christian vision of a brotherhood with the dimensions of the world. Our departure could mean that there is no more hope. To stay is to commit, with many others, to opening a path of hope. If hope were dead, it would mean that our faith is also dead.” As the Dominican Jean-Jacques Pérennès, Monsignor Claverie’s biographer, said in an interview about the 19 martyrs: “They were not beatified because they died, but because they chose to stay.”
Seven years after the beatification in Oran, an extraordinary exhibition (“Called Twice“) dedicated to the 19 martyrs was recently held in Italy (in Rimini) on the initiative of the Oasis Foundation, a think tank committed to interreligious dialogue, with a particular focus on Islam, at the urging of its research director, Michele Brignone. As part of the “International Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples” (Rimini, August 22-27, 2025), a high-level discussion took place with the participation of, among others, Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers (who was Bishop of Oran at the time of the beatification), Sister Lourdes Miguèlez Matilla (an Augustinian missionary and a direct witness to the tragic events), Father Thomas Georgeon, postulator for the cause of beatification of the martyrs of Algeria, and Nadjia Kebour, an Algerian scholar and professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), an expert on Saint Augustine, a Father of the Algerian Church. Pope Leo XIV referred to these initiatives by stating that in the testimony of the martyrs of Algeria, “the Church’s vocation to dwell in the desert in profound communion with all humanity shines forth, overcoming the walls of mistrust that pit religions and cultures against each other, a path of presence and simplicity, of knowledge and a ‘dialogue of life.’”
In Father Georgeon’s account, at the time of the beatification, “Pope Francis was taking decisive steps in a dialogue with Islam. A few months later, the meeting in Abu Dhabi took place with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, and the signing of the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, a text that inaugurated a new era: that of formal opposition to ‘holy war’ through an alliance in which the world’s two largest religions clearly declared themselves to be within the framework of human fraternity.”
Sometimes, in the “civilizational” rhetoric of a prejudiced and openly anti-Islamic nature, there is talk of the need to “protect Christians” in the Middle East (with unacceptable extremes, such as the request for “selective protection” for only Christians in Gaza), but the issue is the substantial historical belonging of Christians to those lands. They do not need protecting powers, but rather rights and full citizenship.
If the story of the martyrs of Algeria teaches us anything, it is precisely the renewed rootedness of Christians in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in ancient national and cultural contexts steeped in history, to whose destinies they are inextricably linked, as can be seen, for example, in the case—still entirely sub judice—of the “new” Syria.