A Christian monk in love with Islam: The Italian Jesuit Paolo Dall'Oglio and his witness in Syria

Guest lecture by Dr. Paolo La Spisa (Associate Professor, University of Florence, Italy).

Abstract

A lover of Islam a believer in Jesus’ is the title of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio’s book, which summed up his life in a single sentence. Born in Rome in 1954, in his youth he was an active scout, afterward his religious vocation emerged in his twenties and led him to join the Jesuits. As he told in his biographical interview, ‘he chose to became Arab and followed a characteristic typical of Jesuits: inculturation’. After being ordained a priest according to the Syro-Catholic rite, he decided to start a mixed monastic community in the monastery of St. Moses the Abyssinian, an abandoned ruin, which he found 80 km north of Damascus and restored with international aids. The heart of the vocation of the monastic community called Al-Khalil, the epithet for Abraham, which in Arabic means the intimate friend of God, is hospitality and the commitment to witness Christ's love for Muslims. It is the same vocation that the French orientalist and Islamologist Louis Massignon called by the Arabic name of badaliyya, which means ‘spiritual substitution’. In other words Al-Khalil is a monastic community of brothers and sisters dedicated to contemplative life, manual work, and Abrahamitic hospitality within the horizon of desire and commitment of building Islamic-Christian harmony.

During the Syrian civil war, Father Paul made the choice not to remain silent in the face of the daily massacre of the civilian population. After being expelled from Syria by order of the secret service of former president Bashar el-Asad, he decided to return into the country underground. His trail was lost in July 2013. The spiritual and cultural legacy of Father Paolo's testimony still speaks to believers and non-believers alike. His spiritual testament is currently being published in Italy, and gradually his teaching is spreading all over the world.