Pope Leo seems providentially destined to be very close to Algeria. The main reason is that St. Augustine was bishop there, and in his recent trip to the country, he spent time at ancient Hippo.
But there's another close link: The martyrs of Algeria, beatified in 2018, are celebrated on May 8. That's the day of Leo's election to the pontificate.
Pope Leo XIV’s 48-hour visit to Algeria was not centered on the memory of the martyrs of the “Black Decade,” those 19 Catholic victims of the Algerian Civil War who were beatified in Oran in 2018. But on his first day in Algiers, the Pope paid tribute to them by making a private visit to the community center run by the Augustinian Missionary Sisters in the working-class neighborhood of Bab El Oued. It was there that two Spanish nuns from the Augustinian congregation, Sister Esther Paniagua Alonso and Sister Caridad Álvarez Martín, lived; both were murdered on October 23, 1994, while on their way to Mass at the Little Sisters of Jesus, a short distance away. These missionaries had chosen to stay despite calls to leave amid the turmoil and violence of the civil war.
So the Pope is spiritually and temporally linked to this group. And it is a prayer of one of them that gives this idea of "disarming."
It comes from the spirituality of Blessed Christian de Chergé (1937-1996), the Trappist prior of the monastery of Tibhirine, who with his brothers chose to remain in Algeria in the mid 1990s, despite the civil war that was tearing the country apart. They preferred to risk their lives to maintain a simple and fraternal presence among the local population.
After being threatened by terrorists for the first time at Christmas 1994, Christian de Chergé wrote a prayer.
Pope Leo quoted this prayer in a preface to a book he wrote.
Father Christian de Chergé, prior of the Tibhirine Monastery, who was beatified with 18 religious men and women martyred in Algeria, after a close encounter with terrorists, received from Christ, in his communion with Him and with all God’s children, the gift of writing words that still speak to us today because they come from God. Asking himself which prayer he could address to the Lord after such a difficult trial, speaking of those who had violently invaded the monastery, he wrote the following: “Do I have the right to ask, disarm him, if I do not begin by asking: disarm me and disarm us in the community? Now this is my prayer which I confide to you in all simplicity.” Some 1,600 years earlier, in the same country in North Africa, Saint Augustine stated: “Let our lives be good; and the times are good. We make our times”. (6)
The word "disarm" is found 14 times in Magnifica Humanitas, and the Pope highlighted this idea in his own personal presentation of the document on May 25.
