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| - Dozens of priests and members of the faithful gathered in Algiers Tuesday for the funeral mass of former Archbishop Henri Teissier, who died last week in France, aged 91. Teissier was archbishop of Algiers from 1988 to 2008, a period that covered the country's "black decade" during the 1990s, when a civil war pitted Islamist militants against the Algerian government. He remained an untiring proponent of coexistence, and people of all confessions paid tribute to his memory on social media, highlighting his love of Algeria. Current Archbishop of Algiers Paul Desfarges said Teissier was a "weaver of links, of brotherhoods". "His body along with his life belong to the land and the people of Algeria," Desfarges said at the ceremony. Attendance at the capital's Our Lady of Africa Basilica, where an additional service will see his body buried on Wednesday, was restricted due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Born in Lyon, where he died last week, Teissier spent his childhood and part of his youth in Algeria, and chose to remain there after the country gained independence from France in 1962. He was an Algerian citizen and his coffin was draped in the Algerian flag. Teissier was an eyewitness to the atrocities of Algeria's 1992-2002 civil war, which killed some 200,000 people. In 2018, the Catholic Church beatified 19 members of the clergy killed during the conflict, in the first ceremony of its kind in a Muslim nation. Algeria's ambassador to France, Antar Daoud, said last week that the North African country had lost "one of its honourable sons". pho-cnp/lg/dwo
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