An Instrument of Peace and Understanding

By Justin Seaton '13

Sometime in 1969, a 28-year-old Fr. Thomas Michel, SJ ‘59 sat in his room in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, pouring over the documents of the Second Vatican Council. He was a Catholic priest from St. Louis, teaching English in a country that was nearly 88 percent Muslim. He looked to the most recent church ecumenical council, closed only four years prior, for guidance as he attempted to navigate life in his unfamiliar new home.

In Nostra Aetate (or, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions), Fr. Michel found the only council reference to Islam — two short paragraphs, which begin: “The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims...”

”We do?” Thought Fr. Michel. He read on. 

“...Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims, this Sacred Synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.”

Fr. Michel’s encounter with this passage was revelatory. “I had never really given it much thought,” says Michel. “I decided then that I would learn about Islam, why the Church regarded its followers with esteem and how to foster peace and understanding between our faithful.”

Thus began what Fr. Michel later called “the project of [his] life” — a project that would form Fr. Thomas Michel SJ, ‘59, into one of the modern world’s foremost experts and most prominent voices on Muslim-Christian relations.

In 1969, “not a few quarrels and hostilities [had already] arisen between Christians and Muslims.” Many more conflicts — namely, violent acts of war and terror — would further divide the Muslim and Christian worlds over the next 50 years. And yet, Fr. Michel’s dedication never waned. He would live among the people he sought to connect. He would be an instrument of peace...

...where there was hatred, he would sow love;
where there was injury, pardon;
where there was doubt, faith;
where there was despair, hope;
where there was darkness, light;
where there was sadness, joy...

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It’s December 2023, and Tom (Fr. Michel has asked that I call him Tom) sits in the first pew of the SLUH North American Martyrs Chapel for an on-camera interview. He is 83 years old now. His voice is high and soft. We’re less than a week from Christmas. The students are on break, but construction crews fill the void, working on renovations to the Chapel and north J-wing. Construction equipment begins to pound into the floor beneath us. While the microphone can barely pick up his words over the ruckus, Tom proceeds gently.

Born in Normandy, Missouri in 1941, Tom was the third of four children. His father worked for the U.S. Post Office and his mother was a housewife. They were both devout Catholics.Their parish was Ascension in Normandy, where Tom was baptized, confirmed and later ordained. Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Tom enrolled at St. Louis U. High in 1955.

Tom remembers hitchhiking every day from Normandy to SLUH and back, just as a harsh drilling interrupts his recollection. He pauses to wait for quiet and smiles at the woodwork behind the altar — perhaps considering that his brother Jesuits would’ve been praying in this space every day while he was working in Rome, Iran, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Libya and Qatar. When the machinery quiets, he musters a memory of a group he joined at SLUH called Interfaith Youth.

“This was before the word dialogue was in style, but that was what we did — we participated in dialogue with non-Christians from all over St. Louis,” says Tom. “I remember those early meetings as a teenager, listening to the Jewish students and the Humanist students, and thinking, ‘these are good people, and they have a lot of things worth saying.’”

Tom credits the SLUH Jesuit faculty for encouraging him to join Interfaith Youth. Years later, when Archbishop Cardinal Ritter sent Tom on assignment to Indonesia, his openness to interfaith dialogue became an essential trait. He fell in love with the people, cultures and religions of Indonesia.

After Cardinal Ritter’s death, though, Tom was summoned home. He had two choices: return to St. Louis to serve the Archdiocese or join a religious order and stay abroad.

“All the Catholics I knew there were Jesuits,” says Tom. “So I joined the Jesuits in Indonesia, took vows in Indonesia.”

Tom encountered the above-quoted passage from Nostra Aetate in Indonesia and expressed his interest in Islam to his Indonesian  Provincial. One day after joining the Jesuits in 1969, he was sent to study Arabic and Islamic Studies in Lebanon and Egypt.

Eventually, Tom earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Thought from the University of Chicago in 1978. In 1980, Pope John Paul II named Tom the new head of the Vatican Office for Muslim Relations, a post he would hold from 1981-1994. Tom’s primary role at the Vatican was to serve as an emissary between the Pope and Muslim leaders. Soon after his appointment, the papacy set up an educational exchange agreement between the Gregorian University in Rome and a system of theological colleges in Turkey. As a part of that exchange, Tom would regularly travel  to Ankara, Konya and Izmir to teach Christianity to Muslim students. Michel guesses that he taught at 16 Turkish Universities over those 14 years. He remembers fondly this period of his life.

“I think of the evenings — the hours and hours I’ve spent in places like Turkey — when my students and colleagues would come over and we would eat millions of sunflower seeds and drink glass after glass of tea,” says Tom. “We would talk about sports, and we’d talk about life in America and Turkey and Indonesia. At some point in the evening, I would be talking about what it meant to me to be a Christian...and at some point, they would be talking to me about what it meant to be a Muslim. I learned a lot in those evenings.”

Exchanges like these became the cornerstone of Tom’s life’s work. He became a bridge between Muslims and Christians, often in places where no other Christians lived. The people of Turkey cared for Tom. He lived in community with them, and they called him “The Monk.” For some, he was the first Christian they had ever met, and yet, they recognized that he was a man of God. In Ankara, they furnished his home; they laundered his clothes; and they left hot meals on his table.

“It was really one of God’s greatest blessings to me to be able to spend so much time with Muslims,” says Tom.

After he left the Vatican in 1994, Tom spent 23 more years traveling, teaching and fostering relationships between Christians and Muslims. In the summer of 2023, at a lecture in Singapore, a middle-aged man whom Tom had met during his travels stood up to speak. “Fr. Michel changed my life,” the man said. “I used to think that Christians couldn’t be saved, but after I got to know Fr. Michel, I realized differently. He helped me see how much we have in common.”

“So many people in a country like the States know about Muslims who have burnt down churches or attacked people,” says Tom. “And of course Muslims have the same idea. They know of all the mosques in America that are being desecrated, Imams being killed and Muslim women being violated. So that’s what they think Christians are like. Helping people of both faiths understand each other better is worth doing. It’s worth spending a life on.” Tom did spend nearly 50 years of his life in dialogue with Muslims. Fairly recently, though, he transitioned to a new line of work. He was teaching religious studies at the Georgetown University Campus in Doha, Qatar when he recognized it was time for a change.

“By 2017 I was well into my 70s, and I recognized that the Jesuits needed somebody younger with more energy for the work in Qatar,” says Tom. “Just at that time, the Jesuits were opening this school in Northern Thailand. They were looking around to see where the greatest need was, so they decided to open it not in Bangkok, but in the northern tip of Thailand, where Thailand meets Laos and Myanmar.” So the Jesuits opened the Xavier Learning Center (XLC) in Chiang-Rai, Thailand. This part of the country is often called the tribal area. The natives of this region are not Thai — they’re Lisu, Mien, Lahu, Palaung, Karen, Akha or Hmong — and they tend to be neglected by the Thai government. They are often subject to prejudice and discrimination in jobs and schools.

Tom and his colleagues at the XLC are attempting to level the playing field by providing a strong education to the tribal people so that they can get good jobs in tourism, education and healthcare. Tom is the only non-native Jesuit at the school, but he’s quite accustomed to being the outsider by now.

Having heard Tom’s story, knowing how many places he has lived and worked, it’s strange to see him sitting on the second floor of the SLUH J-wing. It’s impossible to picture him as a boy. It feels silly to be calling him Tom. After 56 years of travel, do the halls of SLUH not feel more foreign than the streets of Yogyakarta?

“I haven’t been back in a long time,” says Tom at the end of our interview, “but SLUH still feels like home.” The camera shuts off, and one week later, Tom boards a plane to Thailand to continue his work in another of his many homes.

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To learn more about Fr. Michel and his work, read his book A Christian View of Islam (available on Amazon) or watch one of his many recorded lectures on YouTube.