There is a single frame in Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men that is worth more than any geopolitical analysis. A Muslim woman from the Algerian village of Tibhirine turns to a Trappist monk who is weighing whether to leave: “We are the birds, you are the branch. If you go, where will we land?” It is a perfect inversion.
The one who appears fragile — the foreign clergyman in a land on fire — is, in truth, the fixed point of an entire community.
One can start with this image to illuminate an aspect of Leo XIV’s biography that the media narrative of “the first American pope” has almost entirely overlooked. An event that — in a time of grave international tensions — deserves contemplation on the eve of Holy Week.
Before he was elected to the throne of Peter, Robert Prevost was a young Augustinian who, in 1988, chose to remain in the Peru of Sendero Luminoso. The Maoist group’s violence was systematic; it targeted anyone who represented an alternative authority — mayors, community leaders, priests. In the Archdiocese of Trujillo, they offered him an armed escort.
He declined. He chose to share the same risks as the people he served. Some of his confrères left the country, but most stayed, even after three priests were killed in the neighboring Diocese of Chimbote. Not out of any desire for heroism, but because of a basic belief: you do not abandon a friend in times of need.
One can juxtapose this story with another — geographically distant but morally its twin. Between 1994 and 1996, during Algeria’s Black Decade, nineteen Catholic religious were murdered. Among them were the seven Trappists of Tibhirine, abducted on the night between March 26 and 27, 1996 — their heads were found two months later near Médéa — and Pierre Claverie, the Bishop of Oran, killed on Aug. 1 by a car bomb along with the young Mohamed Bouchikhi, a Muslim.
They, too, had chosen to stay. In March 1995, a document circulated among Algeria’s religious communities explicitly asked: Partir ou rester? The answer was disarming: the reasons for staying were the same as those that had brought them there in the first place.
The two stories never intersected, but the question running through them is the same. Why stay where the violence is hunting for you? Claverie, shortly before he died, offered the clearest explanation: we stay as one stays at the bedside of a sick friend — in silence, holding his hand. A gesture that does not change the course of events, yet changes everything.
Leo XIV will visit Algeria in a matter of days — the land of Augustine of Hippo, whom Prevost calls “the first modern man,” and the land of martyrs. He will carry with him the memory of a similar choice.
Had things gone differently in Peru — a roadblock, an ambush — there would be no American pope today, only a martyr. The distance between the two possibilities was, for years, that of a shot not fired, of one road taken instead of another. And it is perhaps this awareness — the knowledge that one’s life has been given back, not merely lived — that is the least visible and most decisive key to his pontificate.
With thanks to Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA) and Antonio Spadaro SJ, where this article originally appeared.
