Born From The Gaze Of God

Christophe Lebreton, OCSO, (1950 – 1996), was the youngest of the seven Trappist monks assassinated in Algeria by terrorists in 1996. Their story has been dramatized in the film Of Gods and Men. Christophe abandoned his law studies to become a monk in France in 1974. Aspirations to radical poverty led him to the simplicity of the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria, to which he transferred in 1987. There, along with his brothers, he cultivated a presence of peace and mutual understanding in a climate of extreme political upheaval.

Lebreton began writing poetry and keeping an ardent prayer journal four months before the terrorists’ first visit to the monastery, and the journal ends just seven days prior to the monks’ kidnapping. The rural Algerian setting, at a particularly tragic juncture in the country’s history, transfigured the soul of the man and the monk, a process that may be glimpsed in the diary entries.