Of Gods and Men and Gethsemane

Rod Dreher is enthusiastic about the new movie Of Gods and Men :

In 1996, Islamic terrorists waging civil war in Algeria kidnapped seven Trappist monks from the Tibhirine monastery, held them hostage for weeks, then murdered them. If you see this event, as I did at the time, as another sad chapter in a long, cruel history of Islamic persecution of Christian minorities, you haven’t really seen it at all.

This is why you have to see the French film “Of Gods & Men,” a fictional version of the Tibhirine monks’ martyrdom. It is also one of the greatest works of Christian art ever made. Such is its power to astonish, to unsettle, and to convict, that, as the critic Steven Greydanus wrote, this is a film “that you do not judge — it judges you.”

The movie shows us the monks’ Gethsemane. These Trappists have lived among the rural Muslim villagers for decades, sharing their friendship, their poverty, their joys, and their suffering. Friar Luc, who is also a physician, provides rudimentary medical care to the poor, who would otherwise have nothing. They are monastic brothers, of course, but as one of them says, “brothers to all.”

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