Leo XIV’s upcoming visit will honour Saint Augustine’s roots and a small Catholic community that shared the nation’s suffering.

For the first time in Catholic history, a pope will make an official visit to Algeria.

From 13 to 15 April, Pope Leo XIV will begin an African tour in the Maghreb country, which will then take him to Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

His trip to Algeria will include two stops: the capital, Algiers, and Annaba, the city of Saint Augustine. The fourth century thinker is a key figure in the pope’s life and in the meaning given to this unprecedented visit.

“I am an Augustinian, a son of Saint Augustine, who once said: ‘With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop’,” Leo said in his first address as Pope to the crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square in Rome in May last year to celebrate his election.

These words sparked enthusiasm in the Algerian media, which emphasised the new Pope’s attachment to the cleric and theologian born in 354 in Thagaste, an Amazigh-Roman city known today as Souk Ahras, in northeastern Algeria.

As bishop of Hippo, the ancient name for the city of Annaba, he profoundly influenced Christian thought.

“Saint Augustine is important to the Pope because he entered the Augustinian Order at a very young age,” Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, told Middle East Eye.

“From the age of 13, Leo attended a school in the United States [where he was born] run by the Augustinians,” he added.

After studying mathematics and philosophy in Philadelphia, the man then known as Robert Francis Prevost joined the Augustinian order at the age of 22 and rose through the ranks to become prior general of the order.

It was in this capacity that he made his first visit to Algeria, in 2001, to participate in the first international symposium on Saint Augustine at the University of Annaba.

Cardinal Vesco says he convinced the new Pope to visit Algeria in the early days of his pontificate.

On the agenda for his upcoming visit is a public address at the Martyrs’ Monument, erected on the heights of the capital in memory of those killed during the Algerian war of independence, followed by a meeting with the country’s highest authorities at the conference centre of the Great Mosque.

Augustine ‘was born here’

The Algerian authorities are attaching particular importance to this visit, the preparations for which are being personally overseen by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.

Annaba, in particular, has been transformed into a vast construction site, with asphalting, painting and cleaning of the streets along the road leading to the Basilica of Saint Augustine, which is also undergoing maintenance work.

‘Augustine is a figure rooted in North African geography and culture. Yet, this essential dimension has long been obscured’

– Abdenasser Smail, historian

For historian Abdenasser Smail, who recently published Saint-Augustin, un Nord-Africain universel (Saint Augustine, a Universal North African), the Pope is visiting Algeria and Annaba to pay homage to the philosopher of antiquity but also “because Augustine is not just a Christian figure.

A key element of Augustine’s thought was how he radically internalised the relationship with God in the depths of the self, what he calls the “inner trinity”: memory, intelligence and will.

“He is one of the major thinkers in the history of humanity. Europe embraced him. The Vatican drew inspiration from him. But he was born here,” Smail told MEE.

The pope’s visit, he added, is not only religious: “It is about historical memory.”

According to him, the tribute Leo is paying to Saint Augustine is a way of righting a historical wrong that has long obscured the theologian’s true origins.

“Augustine is a figure rooted in North African geography and culture. Yet, this essential dimension has long been obscured, both in Western representations and in contemporary Algerian national narratives,” Smail said.

In a country with an overwhelming Muslim majority, “an Algerian Muslim can be proud of this,” he added.

“Because being proud of one’s history doesn’t mean adopting another faith. It means recognising that this land has produced multiple great figures. To deny this is not to defend Islam. It is to impoverish our own memory,” he said.

An Algerian Church

Beyond the very symbolism of Saint Augustine, Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Algeria is also a tribute to, and support for, the Algerian Church, “a very small Church in a Muslim world”, as Vesco described it.

“This is the church of that people, the Algerians,” added the archbishop of Algiers, who has lived in the country for nearly 20 years and was naturalised as an Algerian citizen in 2023.

The Catholic Church in Algeria is one of the smallest in the world: barely 4,200 faithful spread across four dioceses – Algiers, Oran, Constantine and Laghouat – out of a population of 46 million.

It has about 60 priests and 100 nuns and monks, primarily from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Its most striking characteristic is its composition: the faithful are overwhelmingly foreign and of sub-Saharan origin, a reality now visible in every parish.

Native Algerian Catholics number only a few hundred; no official figures are available. The number of faithful plummeted dramatically with Algeria’s independence in 1962 and the mass exodus of Europeans from the country.

“Of course, the Church returned to Algeria with [French] colonisation, because it had practically disappeared [after the Arab-Islamic conquest of North Africa in the 7th century],” Vesco said.

However, this Church has become Algerian, he explained, emphasising the essential role of the archbishop of Algiers from 1954 to 1988, Leon-Etienne Duval, in the process.

As early as 1955, a year after the start of the War of Independence that pitted Algerians against the French occupiers, Duval denounced the socio-economic injustices of the colonial system and the torture and massacres of Algerians committed by the French army, while supporting their self-determination.

Naturalised Algerian in 1964 and promoted to cardinal, Duval succeeded in transforming the church in Algeria from a colonial institution into a church officially recognised and supported by a newly independent state where Islam was proclaimed the state religion.

“Our church remains marked by Cardinal Duval’s appeal in 1962 to priests to stay in Algeria [at the end of the war],” Cardinal Vesco said.

‘It is a church that truly serves Algerian society’

– Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, archbishop of Algiers

“This is how we kept schools, dispensaries, etc open from independence onward, because it is a church that truly serves Algerian society.”

The position defended by Duval, inherited from decades of struggle by liberal Catholics in Algeria, was supported by the Vatican and contributed to the Catholic Church’s dialogue with the Muslim world.

“By bringing the problems of the ‘Third World’ to the forefront, the Algerian experience also contributed to a profound shift in the Church’s theological and political stance toward Islam,” writes  researcher Uriel Gadessaud in the journal Outre-Mers.

“It was during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that the Holy See underwent a true aggiornamento, under the influence of the Algerian War,” he added, referring to the Vatican’s new opening to the world and other religions.

In addition to aspirations for independence, members of the Catholic Church in Algeria shared with local Muslims the sufferings of the “black decade”, the civil war that ravaged the country between 1992 and 2002.

Triggered by the army’s halt to the electoral process in January 1992 after the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round of parliamentary elections, the conflict between armed Islamist groups and security forces killed an estimated 200,000 people.

Among them were 19 Christian religious figures killed between 1994 and 1996, including the Bishop of Oran, Pierre Claverie, and the seven monks of Tibhirine, whose abduction and murder in 1996 remain shrouded in mystery.

Declared martyrs by former Pope Francis, they were beatified in December 2018 in Oran – the first beatification ceremony held in a Muslim country. During his upcoming visit to Algiers, Pope Leo is scheduled to pray in the chapel of these 19 “martyrs of Algeria”.

Calls to address human rights

Today, the small Catholic community lives in harmony with a predominantly Muslim Algerian society, and the faith is officially protected and recognised by the authorities, even if non-Muslim religious practices remain confined to specific spaces.

“I live my faith discreetly, as required by the fact that I live in a Muslim society, but I have never received a single derogatory remark,” Simon, an Ivorian student who has been living in Algiers for three years, told MEE.

Every Sunday, he attends mass at the Diocesan Centre in Hydra, an upscale neighbourhood of the capital.

‘I live my faith discreetly, as required by the fact that I live in a Muslim society, but I have never received a single derogatory remark’

– Simon, Ivorian student in Algiers

“Beyond prayer and communion, we meet to organise charitable activities, classes for disadvantaged Algerian children and book clubs,” added Simon, who said he is “proud and happy about the Pope’s visit”.

“It’s a gift, a grace, for our little flock here in Algeria.”

However, the Christian presence in Algeria also has a dark side: the restrictions targeting Protestant worship and its evangelical branch, although freedom of worship is enshrined in the constitution.

Since 2006, a decree “establishing the conditions and rules for the practice of religions other than Islam” requires authorisation for the creation of religious associations, their practices and their use of buildings.

While the Catholic Church in Algeria enjoys the status of an approved association, and its sermons are even broadcast on public radio, this is not the case for the Protestant Church of Algeria, officially recognised since 2011 but whose activities are only authorised within its main headquarters in Algiers.

There are no longer any legally open Protestant places of worship in the country. The authorities closed them because they suspect evangelicals of conducting conversions, which is prohibited by Algerian law. Some pastors are even facing legal action.

Several Christians contacted by MEE declined to express themselves for fear that the authorities would suspect them of being converted evangelicals.

This situation is regularly denounced in the US State Department’s report on religious freedom and by human rights groups.

On Tuesday, three international NGOs urged Pope Leo XIV to raise issues of human rights and religious freedom with the Algerian authorities during his visit to Algeria.

“We ask you to call on the authorities to end discrimination against religious minorities and to respect their right to freedom of religion or belief, including the right to practice their religion freely,” EuroMed Rights, Human Rights Watch and MENA Rights Group said in a letter addressed to the pontiff.

According to the groups, religious minorities “face discriminatory legal and administrative restrictions that limit their ability to practice, organise and express their faith openly”.

In addition to Protestants, they cite Ahmadis, followers of a faith originating in India who consider themselves Muslim but are regarded as heretics by the Sunni majority in Algeria.

The NGOs also urged the Pope to call on Algerian authorities to “release those arbitrarily detained for exercising their human rights”.

“Hundreds of protesters, activists, journalists and human rights defenders have been arbitrarily detained, unjustly prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” they said.

source/content: middleeasteye.net (headline edited)

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