On Tuesday, 2 January - at 14:30 - in the church of Saints Gervasio and Protasio of Bry-sur-Marne, the funerals of Father Maurice Borrmans, the famous Islamist, member of the Missionaries of Africa (the so-called "White Fathers") took place. The clergy man died at 92 last 26 December in hospital in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon. With his farewell, one of the most authoritative and appreciated voices in the dialogue between Christians and Muslims goes missing, a dialogue to which - in the footsteps of Charles de Foucauld, Cardinal Lavigerie and Louis Massignon - Father Borrmans dedicated his entire life.
A Flemish surname, he was French to the registry office, Arabic in the heart, missionary in the soul, cosmopolitan in culture, Roman for professional reasons. Father Borrmans spent his first twenty years in France where he was born (in Lille in 1925), the following twenty years in Tunisia and Algeria (where - after his perpetual profession with the Missionaries of Africa and his priestly ordination in Thibar in 1949 - he studied at La Manouba and the University of Algiers and immediately began to teach there) then he spent several years in the Middle East (particularly between '81 and '84 as a parish assistant in Bahrain at the service of almost 20 thousand, mostly Asian, Catholics residents), but above all, for over thirty years he had been a lecturer in Rome at the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islam Studies (Pisai) teaching Muslim Law, History of Islamic-Christian Relations, Muslim Spirituality and Arabic language.
It is no coincidence that, while expressing his condolences also on behalf of the French Episcopal Conference, Monsignor Jean-Marc Aveline, auxiliary of Marseille and president of the "Conseil pour les relations interreligieuses et les nouveaux courants religieux", said that "the immense work of Father Borrmans leaves us a precious legacy that is important to collect, not only to better understand Islam and enter into dialogue with Muslims, but also to better express the originality of the Christian faith thanks to its two lungs, that of the East and West".
It is an inheritance that is easy to find in Borrmans’ vast editorial production, in the many speeches he held during conferences in many different cities (Tunis, Amman, Beirut, Rome, Cordoba, Istanbul, Paris, Algiers....), in the several specialized volumes (on legal, historical, theological issues) and highly popular books (among the titles that appeared in Italian we remember here: "Orientations for a dialogue between Christians and Muslims" published by Urbaniana University Press in the first edition in 1988, then renewed in 2016; "Islam and Christianity: the ways of dialogue" Pauline Editions in 1993; "Jesus Christ and the Muslims of the twentieth century" published by Edizioni San Paolo in 2000.
A knowledgeable scholar, he was tenacious, simple yet capable of great friendship. A scholar first of all aware - as he would say - that of the 5 billion human beings on the planet "all created in the image of the Lord", one billion or "one in five people is Muslim", and that therefore "everywhere, we live side by side, either as majority or minority".
A hard-working scholar who lived his work with great passion since the times in which - arrived in Rome from Tunis in '64 with the transfer of the Institute of studies from which Pisai came to life - he collaborated with the team put at the service of the Secretariat for non-Christians created by Paul VI (which later became the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue). For almost thirty years he was at the head of the trilingual magazine (French, English, Arabic) "Islamo-Christiana"; until he formally "retired" in 2004, to dedicate himself to some of his most interesting essays such as, among others – “Fundamentals to understand the Muslims" for Edizioni San Paolo in 2007, "Prophètes du dialogue: Louis Massignon, Jean-Mohammed Abd-el-Jalil, Louis Gardet, Georges C. Anawati" published with the Éditions du Cerf in 2009, "Dialoguer avec les musulmans, une cause perdue ou une cause à gagner?" published by Tequi in 2011. Finally, a scholar, simple and capable of authentic empathy, as the many people gratified by his esteem know. It is "so simple to touch naivety at times", "so wonderfully complex to seem yet unattainable", in short, "a giant of the Islamic-Christian dialogue", so Don Valentino Cottini said during Father Borrmans' laudatio on the occasion of his honorary degree in Missiology conferred to him by the Pontifical Urban University on October 27, 2015. In the same speech, the Pisai’s dean stressed another important aspect of Father Borrmans, remembering him being a "rock-solid Christian-Catholic and missionary, never a proselytizer".
“This statement could be misunderstood, because it is taken for granted. But it is not, neither in one sense nor the other," Valentini continued. Adding "As a priest who has always loved pastoral ministry and as a missionary, he expresses a visceral love for both known and unknown Muslims, and while he respects them in their faith, he continually prays that they may open themselves to the acceptance of Jesus Christ. In this sense it is possible to understand, for example, both the practice and publication of that particular intuition of Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil which is the badaliya, that is the offering of one's life for Muslims, and also other forms of devotion, such as the annual pilgrimage "au Vieux Marché", in Brittany, to the chapel of the Sleeping Seven Sleeps of Ephesus".
Consultant to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, at the Pisai, for several years, Father Maurice had entwined a deep friendship and intellectual consonance with Christian de Chergé, his pupil, Trappist, then prior to the monastery of Tibhirine, in Algeria, kidnapped together with six confreres on the night of 26-27 March 1996 and presumably murdered on 21 March 1996.
Of that intense relationship there remain seventy-four letters addressed by de Chergé to his former professor published last year by Urbaniana University Press under the title "Letters to a fraternal friend", mirror of the journey of a man who sought and honored dialogue with the men of prayer of Islam. This is how Borrmans, the White Father, who insisted with his students that "in the mirror of the other person's religion and of the other, I rediscover the specificity of my own faith. We are thus forced to practise dialogue, let's say, "of the peaks" and not "of the plains"...", he, nevertheless, was sure about one thing, "first we need to know a bit more what the faith of the Muslim is and what the faith of the Christian is".
Knowledge, in fact, was in Father Maurice the premise of an interest and passion that – we shall not forget - also caused him problems on the part of scholars less inclined to establish relationships of trust with people and institutions of the Muslim world. At the same time, a while ago, Don Cottini recalled that, they saw in him "a profound balance, a middle way (in many ways so dear to Islam) that is not naive at all, but that follows and fits into the Catholic Church Magisterium, and does not tire of building bridges wherever it is possible".
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