Seventeen years ago, on March 27, 1996, seven Cistercian monks from the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria were kidnapped by unknown assailants. On May 21 their headless bodies were found. A film of these events, Of Gods and Men won the 2010 Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film portrays the feelings and the emotions of the monks who are caught up gradually in the Algerian Civil War; their fears about staying when confronted with the possibility of being murdered and their desire to live are told simply and movingly. Finally they decide to stay and seven of them are kidnapped and killed. The film shows them talking together, praying together, eating together, sharing their lives as they try to decide what to do. They are so human and ordinary.
Last month, a Muslim mob of 7,000 men attacked Joseph Colony, a residential area of low to middle class Christians, in East Lahore, Pakistan, looted and burned 160 households, 18 shops and two churches. Special chemicals were used to intensify the flames so that even the metal crossbeams melted; this was a premeditated act. The cause for the attack was another alleged charge of blasphemy against a Christian man.
The police had advised the Christian people to leave - which they did - before the mob arrived so there were no casualties; the police made no attempt to stop the mob, in fact, in advising the people to leave they knew the violence was coming. 
Here is a minority community under siege, not unlike the monks in Algeria. I attended a protest in front of the Egyptian consulate in Melbourne, after an attack on a Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, Egypt, on New Year’s Eve 2010, which left 21 people dead and many injured. The protest was against the Egyptian government for doing nothing to protect its Christian communities. The following week when the Coptic Orthodox Church celebrated Christmas, thousands of Muslims stood in solidarity, as human shields with Coptic Christians outside the Coptic Churches. This is the type of support the Christians in Lahore's Joseph Colony need.
Both Christians and Muslims attended demonstrations in Multan, Karachi and Lahore in Pakistan after the Colony was torched, protesting against the fundamentalist violence. It has been remarked that the torching in Lahore was not about religion but securing the real estate of the Joseph Colony for financial gain; but their Christian faith was being used against them.
Oscar Niemeyer the Brazilian architect who designed civic buildings for the city of Brasilia said, ‘What is fundamental is to recognise that life is unjust and that only by lending each other a helping hand as brothers and sisters, can we live life better.”
Fr Gary Walker
director@columban.org.au