Charles de Foucauld
French Catholic priest and hermit
Died when: 58 years 77 days (698 months)Star Sign: Virgo
Charles Eugène de Foucauld de Pontbriand, Viscount of Foucauld (15 September 1858 – 1 December 1916) was a French soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnographer, Catholic priest and hermit who lived among the Tuareg people in the Sahara in Algeria.
He was assassinated in 1916.His inspiration and writings led to the founding of the Little Brothers of Jesus among other religious congregations.
Orphaned at the age of six, de Foucauld was brought up by his maternal grandfather, Colonel Beaudet de Morlet.He joined the Saint-Cyr Military Academy.
Upon leaving the academy he opted to join the cavalry.He thus went to the Saumur Cavalry School, where he was known for his childish sense of humour, whilst living a life of debauchery enabled by an inheritance he received after his grandfather's death.
He was assigned to the 4th Chasseurs d'Afrique Regiment.At the age of twenty-three, he decided to resign in order to explore Morocco by impersonating a Jew.
The quality of his works earned him a gold medal from the Société de Géographie, as well as fame following publication of his book Reconnaissance au Maroc (1888).
Once back in France, he rekindled his Catholic faith and joined the Trappist order on 16 January 1890.Still with the Trappists, he then went to Syria.
His quest of an even more radical ideal of poverty, altruism, and penitence, led him to leave the Trappists in order to become a hermit in 1897.
He was then living in Palestine as a porter at convents of the Poor Clares in Nazareth and in Jerusalem, writing his meditations that became the cornerstone of his spirituality.
Ordained in Viviers in 1901, he decided to settle in the Algerian Sahara at Béni Abbès.His ambition was to form a new congregation, but nobody joined him.
Taking the religious name "Brother Charles of Jesus", he lived with the Berbers, adopting a new apostolic approach, preaching not through sermons, but through his example.
In order to become more familiar with the Tuareg, he studied their culture for over twelve years, using a pseudonym to publish the first Tuareg-French dictionary.
He collected hundreds of Tuareg poems (paying a few sous to anyone who would bring poems to his hermitage) which he translated into French.
He censored nothing in the poems, and never changed anything that might not conform to Catholic morality.De Foucauld's works are a reference point for the understanding of Tuareg culture.
On 1 December 1916, de Foucauld was assassinated at his hermitage.He was quickly considered to be a martyr of faith and was the object of veneration following the success of the biography written by René Bazin (1923).
New religious congregations, spiritual families, and a renewal of eremitic life are inspired by Charles de Foucauld's life and writings.
His beatification process started in 1927 eleven years after his death.He was declared Venerable on 24 April 2001 by Pope John Paul II, then Blessed on 13 November 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI.
On 27 May 2020, the Vatican announced that a miracle had been attributed to de Foucauld's intercession.In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis wrote that "Blessed Charles directed his ideal of total surrender to God towards an identification with the poor, abandoned in the depths of the African desert. ... he expressed his desire to feel himself a brother to every human being, and asked a friend to 'pray to God that I truly be the brother of all'.
He wanted to be, in the end, 'the universal brother'.Yet only by identifying with the least did he come at last to be the brother of all." De Foucauld was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis on 15 May 2022 in Rome.
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