Hello everyone. I hope you are well and keeping safe. I hope you didn’t suffer much, if at all, with Isaias coming through our neck of the woods. I loved how the sun came out so strongly and beautifully after all that tough weather. Would it be foolish of me to think that whenever this pandemic can be brought under control with vaccinations and all, we will be in for some beautiful, symbolic sunny days ahead? I know for the most part people are saying the complete opposite. Comments like, “We will never be the same again!” “The people won’t being come back for church in great numbers.” And the list goes on and on. Well, I can dream, can’t I?
In any event, have you ever heard of Charles de Foucauld? He was born in France in the mid19th century. By his own description, he went from an immature atheist to a soldier to a Trappist Monk but eventually received permission to leave the Trappists so that he could pursue an even more ascetic life. He is now close to being canonized.
Here is a little excerpt of a recent article by Russell Shaw in Our Sunday Visitor (Aug.3, 2020) :
Already, de Foucauld was dreaming of a new religious order, the Little Brothers of Jesus, combining monastic life with extreme poverty and asceticism. In 1901, he received ordination as a priest. A year later he wrote, “I am collapsing under the weight of all my blessings, of the vision of what I should be, of the vision of the good that I should do and of the good that would be done were I to be sanctified.”
But where? His search led him to Algeria and finally to Tamanrasset, a remote hamlet where the poorest of the poor lived on the edge of the Sahara, the vast desert whose stark beauty enraptured him. In his hermitage there he prayed, offered Mass, gave food and medicine to the locals and worked on a dictionary of the language of the Tuaregs, a nomadic people of the Sahara. The book was published after his death.
By now de Foucauld had given up on the idea of evangelizing by preaching. His way was to be the way of example. “On seeing me,” he explained, “people should say to themselves, since this man is so good, his religion must be good.”
‘I give it to you, Lord’
Even so, he considered French colonialism, then in its heyday, a potential vehicle for evangelization, while also criticizing it as he often found it…. [He wrote to a friend]“If France does not govern her colony better, she will lose it, and these people will slip back into barbarism, and the hope of Christianizing them will be lost for a very long time.” The hermitage of Charles Foucauld, built in 1911, is located on the Assekrem in the Hoggar mountains of southern Algeria. On Dec. 1, 1916, marauders entered Tamanrasset after nightfall and seized Father de Foucauld, intending to hold him for ransom. But a nervous teenager, set to guard him, shot him to death instead.
At the time of his death, he considered himself a failure: no converts except one old woman who looked to him for support, no candidates for his religious order, no lasting achievement of any kind. Yet today there are more than a dozen religious congregations and associations inspired by him, while numerous books and articles have been published on his life and thought.
Pope St. John Paul II declared him “venerable” in 2001; Pope Benedict XVI pronounced him “blessed” in 2005, and this past May the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted a second miracle attributed to his intercession and would canonize him at a later date.
Many people recite his prayer of abandonment that reads, in part:
“I put my soul in your hands, I give it to you, Lord, with all the love in my heart, because I love you, and because it is for me a need of love to give myself, to put myself in your hands unreservedly with infinite trust. For you are my Father.”