President of Algeria, St. Augustine’s country, to visit Pope

It takes on particular significance under the current pontificate, as rumors of a possible apostolic trip to Algeria are growing. Leo XIV could make a pilgrimage there in the footsteps of his spiritual master St. Augustine, a figure of reference in Algeria.

The likelihood of this audience had been circulating in diplomatic circles for several weeks, and it was made official on Monday. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune will make his first visit to the Vatican since his election in 2019 on Thursday. He will be received by Pope Leo XIV at around 12:15 p.m. at the Apostolic Palace. Previously, he met Pope Francis briefly on June 14, 2024, on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Bari, southern Italy.

This will be the first visit by an Algerian head of state to a pope in the Vatican in nearly 26 years. John Paul II, who was never able to visit Algeria during his pontificate due to the civil war raging there, received the then new Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika on November 15, 1999.

President Bouteflika, unaware that he would himself experience illness and a difficult physical decline in the exercise of his duties a few years later, asked the Polish pope for news of his health. He presented him with a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary, a book, a microfilm of ancient Christian documents written in Arabic, and a small marble statue of St. Augustine as a child. Abdelaziz Bouteflika then returned to the Vatican for the funeral of John Paul II on April 8, 2005.

This year, Leo XIV's unusual meeting with President Tebboune — visits by heads of state are generally suspended during the summer at the Vatican, except in exceptional cases — comes amid growing rumors of a possible apostolic trip to Algeria, which would be a first for a pope.

According to our information, this trip, already envisaged during the pontificate of Francis, could take place in 2026. It could take the form of a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Augustine, to whom Leo XIV refers very regularly. This is unsurprising, as the current pontiff comes from the Augustinian spiritual family.

The year 2026 would also mark the 30th anniversary of the assassination of the monks of Tibhirine and Bishop Pierre Claverie, then bishop of Oran, whose beatification was celebrated on site on December 8, 2018.

The beatification of Bishop Claverie and 18 other Catholic religious victims of the “black decade” of the 1990s was an exceptional moment of visibility for the small Catholic community in Algeria, mainly made up of migrants and expatriates. Many participants testified to the “cathartic” effect of this celebration for the entire Algerian population, traumatized by these years of violence and marked by a kind of silence surrounding the memory of these massacres.

In the cloister of the Basilica of Santa Cruz in Oran, the minute of silence suggested by Bishop Vesco at the beginning of the celebration to pay tribute to all the victims of this civil war, including the imams, was received with emotion by the many Muslims present.

Jean-Paul Vesco, bishop of Oran at the time of this beatification, became archbishop of Algiers in 2021. His creation as cardinal in 2024 earned him a reception by President Tebboune. His participation in the recent conclave led the Algerian press to take unprecedented interest in the election of the new pope. (Incidentally, he was not the first representative of Algeria in the history of papal elections: Cardinal Léon-Etienne Duval (1903-1996), then Archbishop of Algiers, had participated in the two conclaves of 1978.)

In recent years, the Catholic Church in Algeria has gained visibility, despite administrative difficulties linked to the often irregular situation of African migrants, who make up a large part of its membership. As a sign of this tension, on October 1, 2022, the local Caritas had to cease its activities, being considered by the administration as an “unauthorized NGO.”

However, the visit of the Holy See's “foreign minister,” Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, on October 25 and 26, 2022, helped improve relations between the Algerian state and the local Church. Notably, the Church was allowed to continue its social and humanitarian activities in another form more in line with local law. The British diplomat was received by President Tebboune and his visit was appreciated by both the authorities and the local Church.

Another sensitive issue concerns conversions to Christianity. They aren’t formally prohibited in Algeria, but remain rare and are carried out with great caution within the Catholic Church. Evangelical communities, however, engage in explicit proselytism, which has led to repression by the authorities.

Nevertheless, in a sign of relative flexibility, several Algerians who had converted to Catholicism were among the young participants at the World Youth Day in Lisbon in 2023. Still, the majority of the small group from Algeria was made up of nationals from other African countries.

Elected on May 8, the liturgical memorial day of the monks of Tibhirine, Leo XIV enjoyed favorable attention in Algeria because of his membership in the Order of Saint Augustine. In recent years, St. Augustine, who was bishop of Hippo (now Annaba) from 396 to 430, has been the subject of a powerful resurgence of interest in Algeria, particularly in intellectual circles.

In November 2000, Algerian journalist Kamel Mellouk published an article in the French-language daily El Watan soberly entitled “Why I love Sy. Augustine.” In it, he explained how he had discovered — somewhat by chance during a vacation in Toulouse — the writings of his “compatriot.” Augustine, like him, was a native of Souk Akhras (Thagaste), and Mellouk describes how he had learned from him “the art of loving.”

“Many of our fellow citizens, culturally liberated since the advent of democracy, jealously and proudly claim Augustine as one of their own, even though he’s a Christian and, therefore, for some, a stranger to our Arab-Muslim culture,” Kamel Mellouk explained in the article.

He acknowledged that in the delicate context of the country's emergence from a decade-long civil war, talking about St. Augustine could “reawaken the demons of hatred, ignorance, and intolerance” in part of the population. However, the journalist noted that "as if by magic, many Algerians are beginning to take an interest in Saint Augustine. There’s a kind of rush towards him.”

This interest in St. Augustine as a figure of national unity for Algeria was also reflected in the Algerian state's support—together with France and Pope Benedict XVI—for the restoration of the basilica bearing his name in Annaba between 2010 and 2013.

On a geopolitical level, President Tebboune's visit to the Vatican is also part of his efforts to build closer ties with Italy. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the governments of Mario Draghi and then Giorgia Meloni have sought to diversify their energy sources by turning to Algeria as an alternative to Russia.

Trade agreements have already led to several visits by the Algerian president to Italy. On July 23, 2025, he participated in an Italy-Algeria intergovernmental meeting in Rome and was received by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

This rapprochement between Rome and Algiers counterbalances the distance between Algeria and France, in the context of the imprisonment of intellectual Boualem Sansal and sports journalist Christophe Gleizes, and restrictions on visas issued to Algerians wishing to travel to France.

In this delicate diplomatic context, a possible visit by the Pope could be an opportunity for Algeria to strengthen its position on the international stage. It could also be an attempt to rebalance after Pope Francis' visit to Morocco in March 2019 ( a few weeks after the beatification of the martyrs of Algeria), which had upset the Algerian authorities.

However, the Vatican remains traditionally very cautious on this issue in order to avoid any risk of political exploitation. Such a trip is still hypothetical at this stage, and several months of preparation and negotiations will be necessary before any official announcement can be made.