Written by Jean Olwen Maynard

Published by Catholic Truth Society, booklet, 2010, 75 pages.

After many long years in the Atlas Mountains – years of faithfulness to the monastic routine of work and prayer; of deepening dialogue with Islam; of peaceful and fruitful co-existence with ordinary Algerian Muslims – Christian de Cherge and his Cistercian community faced death at the hands of Islamist guerrillas. Had extremism and violence triumphed in the end? Their loving confidence in God, movingly retold in a major film ‘Of Gods and Men’ (2010), enabled them to respond with an understanding and forgiveness powerful enough to overcome the forces of evil.