May 15, 2022. This is the date announced by the Pope for the canonization of Charles de Foucauld and seven other blessed: Lazarus Devasahayam; César de Buspriest, founder of the Congregation of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine; Luis Maria Palazzolopriest, founder of the Institute of the Sisters of the Poor; Justino Russolillo, founder of the religious order of the Vocationists; María Francisca de Jesúsfoundress of the Capuchin Sisters of Mother Rubatto and the Mother Maria Domenica Mantovani, co-foundress of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family.
Biography of Charles de Foucauld
Charles de Foucauld was born on September 15, 1858 into an aristocratic family in Strasbourg. At the age of five he lost his mother and five months later his father. The orphans were entrusted to his maternal grandfather, Colonel de Morlet.
During his studies, Charles gradually loses his faith. "At the age of 17 I was pure selfishness, pure vanity, pure impiety, pure desire for evil, I was like mad...", "I was in the night. I no longer saw God or men: I was only interested in myself," he recalls.
After choosing a military career, with a fiery temperament, he multiplied his excesses. Nicknamed the "fat Foucauld", he admitted: "I sleep too much, eat too much, think too little". Having inherited a large fortune after the death of his grandfather, he squandered it organizing parties. In 1880, his regiment was sent to Algeria. A few months later, he was discharged for "indiscipline coupled with notorious misconduct". On 8 April 1881 he was discharged from the rolls but, learning that his regiment was to take part in a dangerous action in Algeria, he asked to be reinstated and was readmitted. For eight months he proved to be an excellent officer, appreciated by both his commanders and soldiers. His squadron returned to Mascara on 24 January 1882; but garrison life bored him....
Seduced by North Africa, he resigned from the army and moved to Algiers. For more than a year, he prepared scientifically and at his own expense the exploration of Morocco, which he traveled for eleven months, disguised as a rabbi. There he was overwhelmed by the encounter with Muslims who lived "in the continuous presence of God". On his return to France, he began to take a new interest in Christianity. At that moment, the young officer's life changed. On October 30, 1886, he went to confession, following the advice of his cousin, in the Parisian church of Saint-Augustin. The young convert chose to give everything to God. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he entered the monastery of Notre-Dame des Neiges, with the Trappists of Ardèche, on January 16, 1890: "As soon as I believed that there was a God, I understood that I could do nothing but live only for Him; my religious vocation dates from the same hour as my faith. God is so great. There is so much difference between God and all that is not Him...", she wrote.
The prayer of abandonment
In 1897, desiring to "follow Our Lord in his humiliation and poverty," he left the Cistercian order to lead a hidden life for three years as a servant of the Poor Clares of Nazareth. "In my wooden hut, at the foot of the Tabernacle of the Poor Clares, in my days of work and my nights of prayer, I found what I was looking for so well that it is evident that God was preparing that place for me." It was during these years that she wrote her famous text that would become the Prayer of Abandonment:
My Father I abandon myself to You. Make of me what you will. What you make of me I appreciate it. I am ready for anything, I accept everything, As long as your will be done in me And in all your creatures. I wish for nothing more, my God. I place my life in your hands. I give it to you, my God, With all the love of my heart. Because I love you And because for me to love you is to give me, To give myself into your hands without measure, With infinite confidence, For you are my Father.
In 1900, he returned to France to begin studying for the priesthood. He was ordained a priest on June 9, 1901, at the age of forty-three.
At his request, he was sent to the Trappist monastery of Akbes. "I felt called immediately to 'the lost sheep', to the most abandoned souls, to the most forsaken, to fulfill with them the duty of love: 'Love one another as I have loved you. By this all will know that you are my disciples'. Knowing from experience that there was no people more abandoned than the Muslims of Morocco, of the Algerian Sahara, I asked and obtained permission to go to Béni Abbès, a small oasis in the Algerian Sahara near the border with Morocco," he wrote to his friend Gabriel Tourdes in 1902.
Later, from 1905, he lived in Tamanrasset, in the Hoggar desert. In the hermitage he built with his own hands, he lived "offering his life for the conversion of the peoples of the Sahara". He records his feelings in this biographical note of the beginnings : "Today, I have the happiness of placing - for the first time in the Tuareg area - the Holy Reserve in the Tabernacle". "Sacred HEART of JESUS, thank you for this first Tabernacle in the Tuareg zone! May it be the prelude to many others and the announcement of the salvation of many souls! Sacred HEART of JESUS, radiate from the bottom of this Tabernacle on the people who surround you without knowing you! Enlighten, direct, save these souls whom You love!".
By dint of generosity, hard work in translating the scriptures, including the production of a Tuareg-French dictionary, acting in a completely disinterested manner, he won the recognition and esteem of the Tuaregs, who even took care of him when he fell seriously ill. "My apostolate must be the apostolate of kindness. If I am asked why I am meek and good, I must say, 'Because I am the servant of someone much better than I am.'"
He fought against the slavery that still existed in this village, and used the money that his relatives sent him from France to buy slaves and free them. "He discovered that Jesus" - in the words of Benedict XVI in 2005, during the beatification ceremony - "came to join us in our humanity, inviting us to the universal brotherhood that he experienced in the Sahara, to the love that Christ gave us as an example". Faith, hope and charity without fail: "Tomorrow it will be ten years since I said Holy Mass at the hermitage of Tamanrasset, and not a single convert! We must pray, work and wait". Incessant work that eludes subterfuge: "I am persuaded that what we must seek for the natives of our colonies is neither rapid assimilation nor simple association nor their sincere union with us, but rather progress that will be very uneven and that must be achieved by often very different means: progress must be intellectual, moral and material".
Fearing bands of looters, with more or less political objectives while Europe was torn apart by the First World War, the hermit had an "bordj" (fort) built in Tamanrasset for the Tuaregs to take refuge. It was there, on December 1, 1916, that he died, killed by a shot fired by his guardian. He was 58 years old.
His desire for martyrdom, always present, was expressed in a spiritual note of 1897: "Think that you must die a martyr, stripped of everything, lying on the ground, naked, unrecognizable, covered with blood and wounds, violently and painfully killed... And wish it to be today... So that I may grant you this infinite grace, be faithful in watching over and carrying the cross. Consider that it is to this death that your whole life must lead: see by this the unimportance of many things. Think often of this death to prepare yourself for it and to judge things at their true value".
"Charles de Foucauld, at a time when there was no talk of ecumenism and even less of interreligious dialogue, without having to speak on a theological level with those who did not share his faith, was an interlocutor who was the man of charity. That is Charles de Foucauld the universal brother," Father Bernard Ardura, postulator of the cause of canonization of Father de Foucauld, explained to Vatican News in 2020.
Since then, communities of priests, religious and lay people have emerged to form the spiritual family of Charles of Jesus. Through their diversity, these communities show the unity of their origin and mission.
Omnes correspondent in France.
