Our Lady of Meknès

Our Lady of Meknès - Virgin of the Olives

The advocation that was born in captivity: Christian faith between the walls of the imperial city of Mulay Ismail

There are cities that keep on their stones the weight of other people's suffering. Meknès - the sumptuous, colossal, the imperial city that Mulay Ismaíl raised over the forced labour of thousands of European captives - is one of them. In the 17th and early 18th century, tens of thousands of men captured by pirates in the Mediterranean or made prisoners in the war lived and died among their walls, raising palaces and aqueducts that are today World Heritage. And in the midst of that suffering, the Franciscans were present to accompany the captives and keep the flame of faith on fire. The Virgin of the Olives, an advocation linked to the church of Our Lady of the Olives of Meknès, is the devotional memory of that presence.

1. Meknès imperial city: the colossal dream of Mulay Ismaíl

In 1672, a new Alaui Sultan came to power in Morocco. His name was Mulay Ismaíl ibn Sharif, and his fifty-five years of reign - until his death in 1727 - would transform the country and leave in Meknès one of the greatest cities in the late medieval Islamic world. Contemporary of Louis XIV of France - with whom he shared ambition, taste for magnificence and cruelty towards those who suffered in the name of his glory - Mulay Ismaíl conceived Meknès as his Magrebi Versailles: a city capable of projecting the glory of the Alauí sultanate to the whole world.

To build that dream, I needed arms. A lot of arms. And he found them from several sources: black slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa, soldiers prisoners of their wars with the Berber tribes of the interior, and European captives, most of them captured by the corsaries of Salé - the famous "Corsaria Republic of Salé" - in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The corsaries of Salé were pirates funded and tolerated by the sultanate who attacked European merchant ships, raided the coasts of Spain, Portugal, Italy and even Ireland and captured their inhabitants to sell them as slaves or ask for rescue for them.

Historical estimates of the number of European captives who passed through Morocco during the reign of Mulay Ismaíl range from 25,000 to 60,000 over the period, with huge fluctuations over the years. At the time of greatest capture, there were thousands of Europeans in simultaneous captivity in Meknès and other cities of the kingdom: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, English, Flemish, German. They worked on the construction of the Sultan - the kilometers of walls, the monumental stables for twelve thousand horses, the palace of Dar Kebira, the barns of Heri es- Souani - under very harsh conditions, with long days, subsistence rations and severe physical punishment.

The same Sultan, paradoxically, was not insensitive to the presence of these Europeans. He maintained diplomatic relations with the European powers to negotiate rescue, received embassies and maintained correspondence with Louis XIV himself. Mulay Ismail's relationship with his captives was that of the owner with his possessions: he could be generous with those who served him well and cruel with those who disobeyed him, but he never lost sight of them as an instrument of power and wealth.

2. The Christian Captives and the Franciscan Mission

Since the early times of Berberisque piracy, religious orders for the redemption of captives - Trinitaries and Mercedaries - had organized rescue missions to the cities of North Africa to free European prisoners, mainly by paying for rescue gathered with alms and family donations. These rescue missions were slow, costly and not always successful: sultans and slave owners sometimes rejected the prices offered or imposed impossible conditions.

But in addition to the rescue, the captives needed spiritual attention during the time of their captivity. And for that, the Catholic Church obtained on several occasions from the Sultan permission for religious to remain in Morocco as chaplains of the captives. The Franciscans of the Moroccan Custody were primarily responsible for this pastoral mission during the 17th and early 18th century.

The life of those friars in Meknès was extremely difficult. They lived in a situation of precarious tolerance: the Sultan allowed them because they were useful - they facilitated rescue negotiations and maintained the morale of the captives at levels that made them more productive - but did not guarantee them protection. They could be imprisoned, beaten or killed at any time if the Sultan changed his mood or if diplomatic relations deteriorated. And yet they remained.

In the dungeons and in the neighborhoods where the captives lived, the Franciscans celebrated mass in rudimentary conditions, administered the sacraments, consented the dying, taught the catechism to the children of the captives who were born in Morocco, and kept alive the flame of hope in communities struck by despair and the temptation of apostasy. Because apostasy - to convert Islam to better treatment or freedom - was a real and constant temptation. The friars fought it not with rigorism, but with the closeness and comfort they learned from Francis of Assisi.

Devotion to the Virgin was one of the pillars of that pastoral. The prayer of the rosary, accessible to all without the need for books or clergy, was a way of praying that the captives could practice in secret, in the dungeons, at night, without their guardians preventing it. The Virgin was for those men the Mother who had not forgotten them, who interceded in heaven for their liberation, who supported their families in Europe while they were sweating under the sun of Morocco.

3. The Virgin of Olives and its theological meaning

The title "Virgin of the Olives" - Our Lady of the Olives, Notre- Dame des Oliviers - is not arbitrary. He gives direct to the Gethsemane Garden, called in the Gospels the "orchard of the olive trees," the place where Jesus lived the darkest night of his life before the Passion. It was there, under the branches of the olive trees of the mountain that dominates Jerusalem, that he shouted blood, where he asked the Father to take away from him the chalice of suffering, where he was betrayed by Judas and taken away by the soldiers of the Sanhedrin.

The orchard of the olive trees is, in Christian spirituality, the symbol of accepted suffering: not passive resignation, but active abandonment in the hands of the Father. "Do not do my will, but yours." That prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane is the model of every human prayer in the face of incomprehensible suffering. And Mary, although the Gospels did not place her in the Garden, was in Calvary: she knew the pain of seeing her Son suffer to the end.

To call the Virgin "of the Olives" in the context of Meknès therefore has a theological depth that goes beyond the geographical data. The captives who prayed to Our Lady of Olives were putting their suffering under the cloak of the Mother who had been at the foot of the Cross. They said to him, "You know what the suffering of the innocent is. You were with him in his agony. He's with us now." And devotion to that Virgin supported them in the hope that no suffering lived in union with Christ - and with his Mother - is sterile.

The olive trees are also long-lived and of extraordinary resistance. They survive the fire, drought and brutal pruning. From its burned branches new wafers sprout. The image of the olive as a symbol of hope that does not die has ancient biblical roots: the dove of Noah's ark brought an olive branch as a sign of the end of the flood and the beginning of peace. To invoke the Virgin under the image of the olive tree is to invoke the Mother of indestructible hope.

4. The Franciscan Martyrs in Meknès

The Franciscan presence in Meknès was not free of martyrdom. Several historical sources of the Moroccan Custody document the violent death of Franciscan religious in the city during the period of most corsarian activity and during the reign of Mulay Ismaíl, although the exact details - names, precise dates, circumstances - vary according to the sources and not all are equally documented in critical historical records.

What is certainly documented is the general pattern: religious who arrived to serve the captives, who were sometimes arrested by the authorities when diplomatic relations deteriorated, and who sometimes died in prison or were executed. The fragility of their situation was part of the risk they assumed when they remained. They were not diplomats with guaranteed immunity: they were friars who lived under the variable tolerance of a powerful and capricious Sultan.

The memory of these religious is preserved in the oral tradition of the Custody and in some documents of the Franciscan General Archive of Rome, although their critical historical processing has been irregular. The important thing for devotion is not so much the exact chronology of each martyrdom as the fundamental fact: there were men who chose to stay in Meknès knowing that they could die there, and that they did it for Christ and his captive brothers.

This election, through the centuries, unites the five martyrs of Marrakech and Charles de Foucauld himself: they are all part of the long chain of witnesses that the Christian faith has given on Moroccan soil, from the 13th to the 20th century. A chain of witnesses that the Church of Morocco venerates as part of its deepest identity.

5. The current Catholic community in Meknès

Meknès is today a city of about six hundred thousand inhabitants, the capital of the region of Fez- Meknès and one of the most important historical centers in Morocco. His medina - declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1996 - retains the monumental walls, the imperial doors, the barn of Heri es- Souani and the remains of the Dar Kebira palace that he had built Mulay Ismaíl with the work of the captives. The city is today one of the most visited in Morocco by tourists who travel the circuit of the imperial cities: Rabat, Fez, Meknès, Marrakech.

The Catholic community of Meknès is small and lives under the same general conditions as that of the rest of the country: freedom of worship for foreigners, discretion in pastoral activity, and a presence that is defined more by service and silent testimony than by explicit missionary activity. The church of Our Lady of Olives is the spiritual center of that community.

The Franciscans serving in Meknès are direct heirs of the tradition that began with the chaplains of captives of the 17th century. Its presence in the city is not the result of the colonial Protectorate, but of a much older and deeper historical continuity. When they celebrate Mass in Our Lady of Olives, they are continuing a thread that began centuries before, in the dungeons where European captives prayed the rosary in a low voice under the moonlight.

The present community also includes people of Christian origin - some of them from sub-Saharan countries in migration transit - who find in the churches a space of community and mutual support. His presence renews the life of the small local Christian community with the fervor and intensity of a faith proven by suffering.

6. Spiritual reflection: the olive that does not die

The olive trees of the Gethsemane Garden are, according to tradition, the oldest in the Holy Land. Some are over two thousand years old. They have survived the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Crusades, the centuries of Ottoman rule, the wars of the twentieth century. Every year they bear fruit. Their longevity is, for the pilgrims who visit them, a powerful image of the faith that remains when everything seems destined to disappear.

The devotion to Our Lady of Olives in Meknès evokes that same permanence. The faith of the European captives who prayed in the dungeons of Mulay Ismaíl, the faith of the friars who accompanied them risking the life, the faith of the small communities that today celebrate Mass in the imperial city: all this forms a tree whose roots are deeper than any historical circumstance. The Virgin of Olives is the Mother who guards those roots.

When a pilgrim visits today Meknès and stops before the monumental walls that the European captives raised with their hands - those walls that the Sultan called his work of glory and which humanity calls today World Heritage - he can also look, if he so wishes, to the small church where the memory of those men who suffered and prayed and died is kept. And you can understand that human glory passes, but fidelity persevers. Like the olive tree.

The Virgin of Olives, an advocation born of suffering and hope, remains today the Mother of all who, in distant lands and in difficult situations, keep the flame of faith on fire. His name evokes the Garden where Jesus did not flee from suffering, but embraced it. And her presence in Meknès, discreet and faithful, recalls that the Church does not measure her success in the number of baptized but in the depth of love.