VATICAN (SE): French Trappist monk Father Jean-Pierre Schumacher, the last survivor of the 1996 attack on the Tibhirine monastery in Algeria, died at the age of 97, Vatican News reported on November 22.
Father Schumacher, who was the last of two survivors of massacre, died on November 21 in the monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas, in central Morocco, where he had settled in 2000. The news was announced by the Moroccan Church in Rabat.
He was one of the two monks—the other was Father Amédée Noto who died in 2008—who managed to escape the kidnapping and brutal killing of their seven confrères from the Algerian Trappist Monastery during the country’s 10-year civil war. The film, Of Gods and Men, tells the story.
The superior, Father Christian de Chergé and six other monks, Brother Luc Dochier, Brother Christophe Lebreton, Brother Michel Fleury, Brother Bruno Lemarchand, Brother Célestin Ringeard and Brother Paul Favre-Miville, were all beheaded. Their remains are buried there.
Though the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) claimed responsiblity, the circumstances have yet to be fully clarified.
Born in 1924 in Lorraine, France, Father Schumacher studied with the Marist Fathers. He was ordained a priest in 1953 and entered the Cicstercian [Trappist] Abbey of Notre-Dame de Timadeuc in Brittany in 1957.
He moved to Tibhirine in 1964 with three other, to “build a small community in a Muslim environment, living as poor among the poor.”
Vatican News reported that four years after the massacre, he settled in Midelt, Morocco, along with Father Noto, and became prior of the small Trappist Monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas.
He often asked himself why he was allowed to survive the massacre and that in time he realised that God was asking him to witness the events of Tibhirine and “to make known the experience of communion with our Muslim brothers, which we continue now here in the monastery of Midelt.”
