Br. Henri Vergès
The fifth and final of Jesus’ teaching sections in Mt is called the Apocalyptic Discourse, in which he speaks to his disciples about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and his own eventual second coming. He warns them that they cannot know the future - when they will die, when disasters will befall them, or when he will come again - and so they must live lives of watchful readiness, remaining faithful, just, and merciful even in the face of chaos, upheaval, and persecution.
Henri Vergès was born in the French Pyrenees village of Maternale in 1930. He entered the Marist Brothers in 1946. He had a number of positions in France until 1969, when he went to Algeria and held a series of teaching and administrative positions in private Marist and Algerian state schools. In the 1990’s he worked with Sr. Paul Hélène Saint-Raymond, a Little Sister of the Assumption, running the Ben Cheneb Library, a library supported by the Catholic Archdiocese of Algiers that served the people of Bab El Oued, a poor neighborhood in Algiers. Throughout his time Algeria, Br. Henri was an active member of Ribat al-Salaam, an organization that promoted dialogue and reconciliation between Christians and Muslims.
From 1992 to 2002, Algeria was embroiled in a decade-long civil war fought between the government and various Islamist groups, over the course of which an estimated one hundred thousand people were killed. Although Br. Henri was encouraged to return to France for his own safety, he declined. As fighting increased throughout the country, the Ben Cheneb Library was heavily used by local young people for whom the quiet library was an oasis of calm. Br. Henri did not want to leave Algeria as long as he was able to be of service to Algerians who could not escape the violence in their own country. Br. Henri and Sr. Paul Hélène were gunned down on May 8, 1994 by the Groupe Islamiste Armé. They are two of nineteen Catholic religious who were martyred over the course of the Algerian Civil War, a group which includes the Trappists of the Tibhirine Abbey. These men and women are inheritors of Jesus’ promise: Whoever endures to the end will be saved (24.13).
