c. 1999 Religion News Service

ALGIERS, Algeria _ Their singing rolls across the empty pews of Notre Dame D’Afrique, mournful strains of West African spirituals weaving through European hymns.

For an hour every Friday morning, the tiny congregation gathers with a missionary priest to forget their troubles and to find grace-the Christian evangelical house-worker stuck halfway between Lagos and Paris, the Ghanaian rap musician awaiting his big break, the two Nigerian ladies, bashful and lost after only two weeks in Algeria.”Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Muslims,”read the words painted on a wall behind them.

Outside, gulls wheel and old men nap near the massive basilica, perched over Algiers’ bay and facing a distant France. But it is from Africa’s migrants and Algeria’s Muslims that Notre Dame draws its new identity, as its once formidable French parish dwindles and dies. Notre Dame _ and, indeed, the Roman Catholic Church in Algeria _ is now simply becoming the Algerian church.”In our situation as a minority, everything we do is with the majority, which is Muslim,”said Monsignor Henri Tessier, the Archbishop of Algeria.”For us it is very important to say our church is not a closed church, reserved only for the Christian community. We would like to say to everyone, `You can come.’ We are all brothers and sisters.” The transformation comes as the Catholic Church emerges from one of the most painful periods of its 160-year history in Algeria. Some 20 priests, monks and nuns have been murdered since Muslim militants declared war on the government in 1992, unleashing a bloodbath killing upwards of 100,000 people.

A shaken clergy retrenched but stayed put in the country many members now call home. And the church is slowly rebuilding, bringing in replacements like Father John MacWilliams.

A member of a missionary order called the White Fathers, MacWilliams regularly commutes from his parish in the northeastern city of Tizi Ouzou to lead the Friday morning prayers.”Lord have mercy,”MacWilliams says.”Lord have mercy,”the congregation sings back.”Christ have mercy,”he intones.”Christ have mercy,”they respond.

The dozen congregation members who gulp down bread and soft drinks offered by the priests after the service are all West African immigrants. Many have no official working papers, MacWilliams said. Some have no jobs. All hope to scrape up cash and a plane ticket to a better life.

But months and sometimes years later, many are still here. They wait and worship at Notre Dame.

Yet the basilica’s most numerous and most frequent visitors are Muslims. They bring their children to play in the courtyard outside. They enter shyly, carrying dolls and small gifts for the Virgin Mary, who is also revered in Islam.

Some slowly begin visiting the French priests who run the basilica as well.”They start with simple questions _ what is the difference between Protestants or Catholics, or what is a bishop,”said Tessier, who spends afternoons at Notre Dame receiving callers.”But eventually the real questions start coming out.” Some families want to know about the Catholic religion, he said. Others, especially women, come to talk about their troubles, and, in their own way, to confess.”They tell me I am the only one they can talk to in this way,”he said.”That there is no one else to talk to.” The church is not interested in forced conversions, he said. But, he added,”We’re open to their demands.””The old conception of the church was about saving souls and conquering a market share,”said American author John Kaiser, who is writing a book on Algeria’s monks for St. Martin’s Press.”That’s not what this church is all about. It’s about living the gospel and being there with another community. What you have in Algeria is `we want to be a church for everybody.'” At the height of French colonialism in the 1930s, Algeria’s Catholic community numbered almost 1 million people. Its priests and nuns ran schools, clinics and social service centers across the country. Many middle-aged Algerians still vividly recall their education under”les peres”or”les soeurs.” Today, a mere 25,000 Christians remain, many of them foreigners, most of them Catholic. It is impossible to gauge how many native Algerians are Christians, but priests put the figure in the hundreds. Conversions from Islam to Christianity are rare and quiet affairs that, if known, can pose major legal and social problems.

And while the government practices religious tolerance, there has been a period of retrenchment in relations with the Catholic Church in recent years, Tessier said. Before, priests could attend Muslim services at Algerian mosques. That is now forbidden, he said.

The church has also maintained a low profile since the killings of almost two dozen of its clergy. Most of the murders, allegedly at the hands of Algeria’s Muslim militants, took place between 1994 and 1996.

In one instance, seven French monks were abducted from a mountain monastery in northern Algeria. They were brutally murdered a few weeks later.

In another, Muslim rebels posing as police entered a Catholic home of parish priests in Tizi Ouzou and ordered four White Fathers to come with them. When the priests questioned their identity, the rebels shot them in the back.

The priests’ 1994 deaths triggered a massive demonstration in Tizi Ouzou. Thousands of distraught residents poured into the streets and followed the priests’ caskets to a nearby Christian cemetery.

A year later, three replacements quietly arrived in Algeria. They built a new parish in Tizi Ouzou and started a fledgling library for university students.

Like most clergy here, they are closely guarded by government security officers and rarely venture outside the parish grounds. But, said MacWilliams, they receive a steady flow of Algerians who come in for help with official documents, or just to chat.”It’s normal that you don’t leave, unless it’s going to bring danger to other people,”MacWilliams said as he led a visitor around the Tizi Ouzou parish and church.”Otherwise you stay.” Tessier was also called to shore up a battered clergy from his post as a church librarian in Rome. In Algiers, the bespectacled, 78-year-old priest speaks fondly of his parish garden and of Notre Dame’s powerful organ. He has no intention of leaving any time soon.”The future for me is to develop Christians who take over the Algerian church,”he said.”The church is here in Algeria. But it is not us, it is the Algerians, who can realize a truly Algerian church.”

DEA END BRYANT