Archbishop of Oran: “France focuses on the death of 19 Monks and overlooks that of 200,000 Algerians”

The Bishop of Oran, Jean-Paul Vesco says he’s grateful to have received numerous messages of sympathy and condolence from the Algerians in the aftermath of last Friday’s deadly terror attacks that took place in Paris.

Bishop Vesco acknowledged that there is a dialogue between the two communities in Algeria, but it is not at the institutional level.

“It is a direct dialogue with the people through the involvement of the Church in Algerian society, explaining that inter-religious dialogue is rare here in Algeria, which is not the case in France where the religious authority engages in a free-wheeling dialogue with other religions”.

He also said that during the Sunday Mass service in Oran, western Algeria, the faithful in attendance do not exceed 250 people, most of them being students, Africans, some Europeans who were born in Algeria, in addition to workers in foreign enterprises and some Algerian Christians.

Monsignor Vesco also stressed that the Church has always been well received by the Algerians and that it was at the request of Cardinal Duval, the Bishop of Algiers, shortly after the independence of Algeria, that the Monks remained in the country to take in charge schools and medical care facilities in the wake of the sudden departure of the Europeans so as to ensure their follow-up and to hand them over later to the Algerians.

The Bishop of Oran further asserted that emphasis had been laid more on the 19 Christian Tibhirine Monks who were murdered in Algeria, stressing one must remember that there were more than 200,000 victims in Algeria during the “black decade” of the nineties, while highlighting that the number of Muslim imams who were killed during that somber period was much greater than the number of slain Christian clergymen.