In the third of his recent visits to Muslim-majority countries the Pope again found inspiration for renewal of the Church in the faithfulness and service of their small Christian communities

Inside the Art Deco 1930s-style cathedral in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, Pope Francis bowed to kiss the hand of a 95-year-old Trappist monk, Jean-Pierre Schumacher. Brother Jean-Pierre is the last surviving member of the Tibhirine community, who refused to leave Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s out of solidarity with the local Muslim community. Seven of the monks were later kidnapped and then murdered; they were among the 19 Algerian martyrs beatified on 8 December last year.

The image of the Pope and the monk in Saint-Pierre Cathedral was a reminder that the Church is built on the teaching of a suffering servant who “did not come to be served, but to serve”. It put the recent self-indulgent debates over the rights and wrongs of papal ring-kissing into context. Here was an icon of what a Tibhirine model of a more humble Church could look like, with the blood of the Algerian martyrs its seedbed.

I have seen this model of the Church in action when travelling with the Pope on his three landmark trips to build bridges with Islam: to Egypt in 2017, the United Arab Emirates in February 2019 (the first papal visit to the Arabian peninsula), and last week to Morocco.