Venerable Odette Prévost

Odette Prévost (17 July 1932 – 10 November 1995) was a French Roman Catholic nun, who was working as a teacher and a librarian when she was killed in Algiers en route to Mass. She is recognized as a martyr and was proclaimed blessed on 8 December 2018. Odette Prévost was born in Champagne in Oger in the Marne department of France on 17 July 1932. She became a teacher and taught English for three years, at Avize. She asked herself the question of the religious vocation, and thought first of all about Cistercian life, but then decided to follow the footsteps of Charles de Foucauld. She joined the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart at age 21, in 1953. For her first mission, Prévost was sent in 1958 to Morocco, to Kbab, among the Berbers. She served at the clinic, and gave girls knitting and sewing classes. She thus met the Muslims and their culture. Prévost made perpetual profession in 1959. She also met for a year Father Peyriguère, the famous French hermit who lived alone nearby in the Moroccan Atlas, imitating Father de Foucauld. Recalled to France, where she worked among the Argenteuil laborious and disadvantaged population, she wanted to move back to Algiers, where she arrived in 1968, in the district of Kouba. She participated in the founding of a community of Sisters, and lived in the same destitution as the local population. Desiring to better master language and culture, she moved to Rome in 1980 to study classical Arabic and Islamic sciences for two years. Returning to Algiers, she joined the Diocesan Cultural Center "Glycines", where she was alternately librarian and teacher of Arabic. She was also part of Ribat-el-Salam (Link of Peace) where she met the monks of Tibhirine. According to the Prioress General of her order, she was tall and intellectually gifted, but did not possess an easy temperament.