Last Sunday, when US president Donald Trump was lambasting Pope Leo as “weak on crime and terrible on foreign policy”, the pope was preparing to leave for a trip to four African countries, starting with Algeria.

Pope Leo is an Augustinian, and St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, now called Annaba in modern Algeria. Algeria has a powerful grip on the pope’s imagination for another reason. The date of his election is also the liturgical feast day of the 19 Christian missionary martyrs who died in the Black Decade of Algeria’s civil war. Their number includes two missionary Augustinians, Sisters María Caridad Álvarez Martín and Esther Paniagua Alonso, murdered on their way to Mass. But perhaps the best-known are the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine monastery who were kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist terrorists.

Xavier Beavois’s award-winning, atmospheric 2010 film, Of Gods and Men, dramatises the dilemma faced by the Trappists. Deeply embedded in service to their local Islamic community, including through medical attention, they were threatened by terrorists for the first time at Christmas 1994. Remarkably, their prior, Father Christian de Chergé, managed to persuade them to leave, but by choosing to remain in the monastery, the Trappists were always on borrowed time.

One of the motifs of Leo’s papacy has been the repeated use of the phrase “unarmed and disarming peace”. The........

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