story by Robert Blair Kaiser
photos by Ivo Saglietti

In 1601, after spending 21 years studying the language, history, and culture of China, Jesuit Fr. Matteo Ricci landed in the court of Beijing and put his Western learning at the disposal of the emperor Wan-Li. For almost a decade, Ricci became the most important connecting link between West and East, between European Renaissance culture and Chinese culture, and between the ancient Chinese civilization and the world of Europe. He was reined in by Church authorities in Rome for using secular Chinese rites to honor the dead in Catholic requiem masses. They had a word for Ricci: syncretist.

In 1982, Italian Fr. Paolo Dall'Oglio, SJ, a student of Arabic language and culture, first visited Deir Mar Musa el-Habashi (St. Moses the Abyssinian), a Syrian monastery dating to the sixth century A.D., and made a retreat among the ruins. Ordained a Syrian-rite priest two years later, he started returning here during summers and, in 1991, established a community with the hope of also establishing a model for Christian-Islamic dialogue.

On October 24, 2001, Ricci's memory was rehabilitated by Pope John Paul II, who hailed him as the very model of a modern major missionary. The pope said Ricci brought "the Christian revelation of the mystery of God" to China in a way that "did not destroy Chinese culture" and pursued the "patient and far-sighted work of enculturating the faith in China, in the constant search for a common ground of understanding with the intellectuals of that great land."

For some time now I have been hearing tales of a man following Matteo Ricci's path, an Italian Jesuit (naturally) named Paolo Dall'Oglio, who has founded a Christian community called Deir Mar Musa, the Community of St. Moses the Abyssinian, high on a cliff in the Syrian desert. His goal: to further a greater rapprochement with Islam by "reinventing the positive relationship that existed between the first Muslims and the Christian monks on the borders of the Arabian deserts." I wondered if Dall'Oglio was a man who could make himself over as completely as Ricci did, when he "became Chinese." I wondered if Dall'Oglio, too, was a syncretist? I also wondered if he was the kind of Catholic link to Islam envisioned by the Jesuit General Fr. Pedro Arrupe after Vatican II?

What Arrupe saw was a new world aborning, a world that the various religions had to stop fighting over and start fighting for. To Arrupe and to those imbued with the spirit of the Council, most people couldn't change the faith they were raised in. The important thing was how deeply they understood and loved that faith and how they made that faith work in their lives. And, a new wrinkle: how could they learn to live alongside others as those others went about the business of making their own faith work for them? For the Jesuits, the way was clear: they needed new kinds of missionaries who would not go forth to convert the savages but listen and learn from those often more spiritual than they. Paolo Dall'Oglio became one of this new breed. In 1977, Arrupe dispatched him to Lebanon to learn Arabic and Islamic culture—to begin, at age 23, the kind of deep cultural transformation epitomized by the giant Matteo Ricci.

Now, some 25 years later, Dall'Oglio at age 48 does not consider himself a giant. But he does think of himself as a Muslim "because Jesus loves Muslims, the same Jesus who is alive in me. In a sense, I cannot but be a Muslim by way of the Spirit and not the letter." Without losing his faithfulness to the mystery of the Church of Jesus Christ, Dall'Oglio has managed to inculturate and embody much of what it means to be a Muslim—culturally and theologically.

But he looks and talks very much like a 21st-century Jesuit, as I quickly learned when I met him in a parlor at the Gregorian University in Rome where he was visiting. He was a tall, animated man on the move with flashing eyes, wearing Nikes, a ski jacket, and a backpack—and coughing through a very full salt-and-pepper beard.

The community's daily chores include milking goats to make cheese, working on construction projects, tending to olive gardens, praying, and taking care of guests.

The rhythm of life at the monastery includes work, prayer, dialogue, and extending an ancient "Abrahamitic" hospitality to visitors of all religions, any nationality. The stunning setting is on a cliff overlooking a valley. (Above) Old stones are going into a new building for nuns and female guests; ancient caves just north of the monastery serve as rooms for monks and male guests. The plan is to free up the monastery itself for meeting space, communal life, and office space for Br. Jens (Left) and the monastery's computers.

"I am sorry," he said, "I have the flu or something." His English was good—a great deal better, at least, I told him, than my Italian. "Or," he joshed, "your Arabic."

I asked him about his immersion in Islam. "As soon as I arrived in Lebanon in 1977," he said, "I tried to start thinking in Arabic." Among other things, he learned the Heart Prayer in Arabic (Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner) and made it as habitual as his own breathing.

He came back to Rome for philosophy and theology studies, but he spent every summer somewhere in the Arab world. And he not only learned what Islam was, he learned to love it too, not least from the writings of the Catholic Islamic scholar Louis Massignon (1883–1962) and Catholic Islamic monk Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916).

Dall'Oglio produced a doctoral dissertation at Rome's Gregorian University called "Hope in Islam." He was ordained a priest in the Syriac Catholic Rite and then moved to his first assignment—to Islam, to Syria, where he eventually came upon his future monastery.

Some of the monastery's frescoes date to the eleventh century A.D. Visitors to the monastery have included adventurer Richard Burton in the 1870s and Pope John Paul II in 2002.

Dall'Oglio dug into his backpack to find a picture of Deir Mar Musa, a long shot of a fortress-like complex built on top of a cliff. It was first constructed, he said, in the sixth century, frescoed in the eleventh century, and abandoned in the nineteenth century, then given to him by the Catholic Antiochian bishop of Homs, Hama, and Nebek in 1991. The frescoes in its chapel are priceless.

The community of Deir Mar Musa has an international cast of monks and nuns in their 30s plus some lay collaborators, including two married couples, and some novices, too.

After four years, those who are approved take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, plus promises of contemplation, work, hospitality, and loving Islam. They wear gray woolen habits, cinched with a leather belt. They do not follow any special dietary restrictions but do not eat pork or drink wine when they have Muslim guests.

Shoeless, their heads covered with prayer shawls, the community kneels on fine Oriental carpets and shares an hour of prayer every morning, starting at 7:30, followed by a talk with Dall'Oglio. After breakfast, they work until 2:30 in the afternoon, milking their goats, making cheese, tending their gardens, and constructing a new building for the nuns and female guests. (They have already remodeled a series of ancient caves, north of the monastery, for the monks and male guests.) After lunch, they take a siesta when they can, they study, and they go on the Internet, creating a virtual monastery in cyberspace at www.deirmarmusa.org. In the evening at seven, they have an hour of silent prayer in their ancient chapel. Then they do their Eucharist.

Says Dall'Oglio, "We practice an Abrahamitic hospitality." In fact, hospitality is the whole point of their existence. They want to bridge the tremendous gap between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammed, and they feel they can do this best by meeting with all who come—for a day or a week—answering their questions, inviting them to join in their prayers, building on their mountain a people's park with and for them, joining in their fasts for peace.

In the beginning, they had problems—with both Muslims and Christians who did not understand what Dall'Oglio was up to. He was approached one day by a group of four middle-aged men who charged him with being a spy.

(Left) Monks and guests prepare a simple lunch of bread, olives, olive oil flavored with thyme and cumin, and fresh cheese made by Sr. Hulda (right).

"This," he recalls, "was hard to refute. The more I look okay and sound okay, the more I prove how effective a spy I really am. Finally, I tell them, 'All right. Look in my eyes. If you see something that is not sincere, you have every right to beat me. And I am honor bound to let you do it.'"

They withdrew, conferred together, then reapproached him and looked into his deep brown eyes and saw — something good. They did not beat him. "Today," Dall'Oglio says, "they're among my best friends."

The library at Deir Mar Musa contains all the classic Christian texts ("we have to sink roots deep into our own tradition") and the Qur'an and some of the classic commentaries on Islam's sacred book. "Our monks and nuns know the Qur'an almost as well as many Muslims," says Dall'Oglio.

Dall'Oglio sees his work of reconciliation with Islam extending in the future toward some kind of mediation between all the warring parties in the Middle East. "This is very delicate," he says, "but everyone knows that we cannot continue to use religion as an excuse for violence of all kinds. We have to find a way to break through the infernal circle of fear that we feel, all of us."

Where does one put the focus? Dall'Oglio says it is clear that people in every religion have to dig deep into their own roots to find the rationales for dealing with everyone in justice and peace. He has found those roots in both the Old and New testaments. He has found them in the Qur'an. People who don't go to their roots, but follow only the letter (of whatever sacred text), he says, are the real troublemakers in this world. "Follow them and we are doomed."