Pierre-Lucien Claverie, OP (8 May 1938 – 1 August 1996) was a French Catholic prelate who was a professed member from the Order of Preachers and served as the Bishop of Oran from 1981 until his murder in 1996 by Islamic extremists.
He was committed to ecumenism and dialogue with the Islamic faith and dreamed of a peaceful co-existence with Muslims in an independent Algeria. He likewise was noted for his studies on Islamic culture and his mastering of classical Arabic which he even taught to those Muslims who understood the common popular language rather than its classical origins. Claverie was also a prolific writer on dialogue which he made the core focus of his episcopal life.
Claverie's cause for canonization opened on 31 March 2007 as part of a larger group cause of other religious killed during the course of the Algerian Civil War. Pope Francis confirmed the group's beatification in 2018 and it was celebrated in Oran on 8 December 2018.
Life
Education and priesthood
Pierre-Lucien Claverie was born as a French citizen in 1938 in a working-class European part of Algiers known as Bab-el-Oued at the time of French Algeria. He was the fourth generation of French settlers and had Algeria as his home. He grew up in a nurturing environment that was raised in the faith but not all that pious. It was in 1948 that he joined a group of Scouts under the guidance of the Dominicans. Because of the danger, his mother and sister left the department of Alger just prior to independence in 1962 while his father left in February 1963 when he reached retirement.
Once he completed his studies and earned his baccalauréat, he travelled to Grenoble in France in order to pursue his college education. There he was confronted with protests against the French presence in Algeria and realized the limitations of the French world in which he grew up which he later called "the colonial bubble".
Claverie joined the Dominicans and started his novitiate at the convent in Lille on 7 December 1958 and made his initial vows the next December. He went on to pursue his studies at Le Saulchoir which was a Dominican institute near Paris where he read the works of the Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu. Meanwhile, the war of independence which started in Algeria in 1954 came to an end in 1962 as he underwent his formation and education. Claverie was ordained to the priesthood in 1965. He returned to Algiers from March 1962 to September 1963 in order to finish his mandated time in the armed forces and worked with chaplains and ran a club for enlisted men; he refused to bear arms.
He chose to return to Algeria in July 1967 to participate in the rebuilding of his new and independent nation. This idea inspired him and the galvanized Claverie learned Arabic and became a noted reference on Islam. From January 1973 to 1981 he ran the Centre des Glycines in Algiers, an institute for the studies of classical Arabic and Islam; the original idea was for the institute to be a place of study for those religious planning to serve in Algeria, but Algerian independence led many Muslims to come the center, eager to study Islamic culture and intent on learning Classical Arabic since the language of colonization had been French and the language of everyday life had been dialectal Arabic.
Episcopate
Relations with Islam
Pierre Claverie was a man of dialogue and he participated in numerous meetings between Christians and Muslims but was at times critical of formal inter-religious conferences which he felt remained too basic and surface-level. He shunned those meetings since he believed them to be generators of slogans and for the glossing over of theological differences. He had such an excellent knowledge of Islam that the people of Oran called him "the Bishop of the Muslims" which was a title that must have pleased him since he had dreamed of establishing true dialogue among all believers irrespective of faith or creed. Claverie also believed that the Islamic faith was authentic in practice focusing on people rather than on theories. He said that: "dialogue is a work to which we must return without pause: it alone lets us disarm the fanaticism; both our own and that of the other". He also said that "Islam knows how to be tolerant". In 1974 he joined a branch of Cimade which was a French NGO dedicated to aiding the oppressed and minorities.