[Salon] Pope Leo XIV visits Algeria and revisits St Augustine - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Pope Leo XIV visits Algeria and revisits St Augustine Summary: the upcoming visit by Pope Leo to Algeria is both historic – he is the first pope to visit the country – and symbolic, a statement that in a region and a world plagued by violence the rejection by St Augustine of unjust wars is the only path to take. We thank Francis Ghilès for today’s newsletter. Francis is a senior associate research fellow at CIDOB and a visiting fellow at King’s College, London. You can find his latest Arab Digest podcast Algeria, Libya and Europe’s urgent energy needs here. On Palm Sunday Pope Leo XIV delivered a subtle but powerful rebuke to those who use God to justify war: Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who use war but rejects them saying ‘even though you make many prayers I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.’ Though he did not name them he was implicitly referring to Christian Zionists who embrace the belief that the land of Jesus belongs to the Jews and that when the Jews possess it in its entirety Jesus will return to Jerusalem for the Rapture, the end of time, when Christians will be saved and all those others who do not convert will be consigned to eternal damnation. It is an ideology embraced by the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Ambassador Huckabee quoted the bible to support his belief that much of the Middle East belongs to Israel. He told Tucker Carlson: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose….It would be fine if they took it all.” Of Secretary of Defense Hegseth the religion scholar Toby Matthiesen writes: He called on God to ‘break the teeth’ and kill the ‘wicked’ enemies ‘who deserve no mercy’ and should be ‘delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.’ In other words, for Hegseth this is a holy war in which he calls on God to ‘grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence.’ A week from today and a little more than two weeks since that Palm Sunday rebuke Pope Leo will arrive in Algeria a Muslim country with a great and ancient link to the Catholic church. Algeria is the birth place of St Augustine. A statue of Saint Augustine of Hippo at the entrance to his Basilica in Annaba, Algeria In making this historic visit the Pope, a self-proclaimed Augustinian, is paying tribute to this towering figure when he begins a two day visit on 13 April, the start of a trip that will also take him to Cameroon, Angola and Guinea Bissau. In Book X of his Confessions, St Augustine says of God: “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new”. The same could be said of a man who, for Christians, remains, nearly sixteen centuries after his death in Hippo Regius - now Annaba in eastern Algeria - the most referenced authority after the Bible. The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne was so taken with St Augustine’s City of God that he slept with it under his pillow. St Thomas Aquinas refused to criticise him despite holding a different opinion and the Augustinian influence did not wane after the Middle Ages. It was an Augustinian friar (Martin Luther) who started the Reformation, and its greatest systemiser, John Calvin famously proclaimed: “Augustinus……totus noster est” (Augustine is totally ours). Following the Reformation, St Augustine influenced many important thinkers: both Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal saw him as the foundation of their own philosophical and theological projects even though they were fundamentally at odds with one another. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzshe wrote The Genealogy of Morals which the Dominican friar Bonaventure Chapman describes as “St Augustine’s City of God argued backwards”. For Algeria, the first visit by a pope is something of a diplomatic coup. At a time when the country’s relations with France are fraught, far right French commentators have expressed their surprise that the pope should visit a country that they see as a dictatorship. Others in France hope that Algeria’s president Abdelmajid Tebboune might pardon the French sports journalist Christophe Gleizes who was arrested in 2024 and the following year sentenced to seven years in jail for “glorifying terrorism.” Algerians acknowledge in private that the charges are trumped up. The Archbishop of Algiers, Mgr Jean-Paul Falco first suggested to the pope that he visit Algeria. The archbishop regularly visits Gleizes in prison. The most famous Archbishop of Algiers was Cardinal Charles Lavigerie (1825-1892) who played a key role by reconciling the young Third Republic with the Vatican in 1886. He also founded the White Fathers order in Algeria with the aim of bringing Berbers back to the faith of their ancestors. Christianity had long prospered in what was then known as Numidia which gave three popes to the early Church. Few Berbers were converted by the White Fathers but they did include my paternal grandfather who was the son of the imam of Tizi Hibel in Kabylia, the mountainous region due east of Algiers. The three early popes who hailed from North Africa left a lasting mark on the Church. Victor I (189-199) is best known for insisting that Christians celebrate Easter on a Sunday. Miltiades (311-314) was granted permission by Emperor Constantine to build the Lateran Basilica, now the oldest public church in Rome. Gelasius I (492-496) was the first pope to be called the Vicar of Christ. The focus of the papal visit is St Augustine who was born in Thagaste - an important Roman community in north east Algeria – in 354 of a pagan Roman father Patricius, who converted on his deathbed, and a native Christian mother Monica. A fiery student in Carthage, he later established a school of rhetoric where he taught for nine years and fathered a son Adeodatus from a long term lover before moving to Rome and Milan. There he was awarded the plum appointment of professor of rhetoric at the imperial court where he met Bishop Ambrose who helped him re-evaluate his relationship with Christianity. He was baptised on Easter Vigil in April 387 in Milan, returning to Africa that same year. He was ordained priest in Hippo Regius in 391, becoming bishop of the city in 395. In his Confessions, one of the most read books in Christendom, Augustine explained that his conversion was prompted by reading a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Romans, which said: “Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in clambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof”. During his lifetime, it is believed he preached some 6,000 to 10,000 sermons, of which 500 are accessible today. The Vandals, who had swept down across Gaul, Iberia and the Strait of Gibraltar, laid siege to Hippo Regius. Augustine died during the siege in 430. When they broke into the city the Vandals burned almost everything apart from the library and cathedral Augustine had built. St Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the ancient platonic tradition within Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian world. Though he was the first to enunciate the concept of just war he did so within a framework of abhorrence of violence and war. The idea that humans are inherently sinful and that conjugal relations within a Christian marriage was a means of redemption and act of grace was something largely formulated by Augustine. Recognised as a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298, he is venerated by Catholics and Protestants alike. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch states that “Augustine’s impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated.” There are a few thousand Catholics living in Algeria today though the country boasts hundreds of Catholic cemeteries, a testimony to the 132 years of French colonial rule (1830-1962) and fewer than 200 Jews. At a time when conflicts in the Middle East are increasingly presented by Israeli leaders and Christian Zionist Americans in the eschatological terms of the Rapture the visit of the Pope to Algeria and the lasting influence of St Augustine remind Westerners that Europe’s history is inextricably bound up with that of North Africa and that closer economic, scientific and cultural cooperation between Europe and North Africa would benefit both rims of the western Mediterranean. Pope Leo’s visit underscores that such a vision is achieved not by war but by peace.