Saint Charles de Foucauld

Around him lived the poor Tuareg people, leading a nomadic life in the wilderness. In fifteen years living among them, he did not baptize a single adult, did not found a busy parish, and never preached a single public sermon. He simply lived as a little brother, kindly sharing every bowl of water and every bit of medicine, and patiently learning their words one by one.

That silent hermit was Charles de Foucauld, known in religion as Brother Charles of Jesus. His was an extraordinary transformation: a pleasure-loving young aristocrat and officer who had lost all faith was changed by the love of Christ into a “universal brother” to all. He chose the very last place, living in the desert like a grain of wheat buried deep in the earth, and from that hidden life came a harvest that would later produce dozens of religious communities and spiritual movements.

When Charles was only six, his father and mother died within a few months of each other. The orphaned boy and his younger sister Marie were taken in by their maternal grandfather, Colonel Beaudet de Morlet, a man who loved them dearly but spoiled his grandson far too much. Heir to a large family fortune, young Charles entered the famous military academy of Saint-Cyr. There he soon became notorious for his extravagant, dissolute life: lavish parties, expensive wine, gambling and women. He said that he had given up the Christian faith at sixteen, and he considered himself a complete atheist.

In 1880 he graduated as a cavalry officer and was posted to Algeria, in North Africa. There he caused a scandal by insisting on keeping his mistress with him in the garrison, and the army disciplined him, removed him from his post and sent him home for conduct unbecoming an officer. But when he heard that his old regiment in Algeria was going into a dangerous campaign against rebels, his pride as a soldier stirred. He broke off with his mistress, volunteered to rejoin, went to the front lines and fought with great courage.

His conversion was as sudden as lightning. He later wrote the words that shaped the whole rest of his life:

“As soon as I believed there was a God, I understood that I could do nothing else but live for Him alone!”

But after seven years of monastic life, he felt these monasteries were still too comfortable and secure. He asked permission to leave the order to live a more radical poverty. From 1897 to 1900 he lived in Nazareth as an unknown handyman for the Poor Clare nuns, sleeping in a wooden toolshed, sweeping the yard, gardening and cleaning every day, and spending whole nights in prayer before the tabernacle. Urged by his spiritual director, he returned to France to study theology and was ordained a priest at Viviers on June 9, 1901, at forty-two.

In 1905, at the invitation of his old friend General Laperrine, he went still deeper into the southern desert and settled at Tamanrasset, an isolated village in the rocky, barren Hoggar mountains, home of the Tuareg. There he lived completely alone among the nomads. He did not try to convert them with sermons. The way he left to those who would follow him was “mission through presence”:

“I am here not to talk about Christ, but to live Christ... Let us live in such a way that when people see how we live, see our gentleness and our charity, they will ask themselves: who is the One this man worships, that He makes him so good?”

He patiently learned Tamahaq, the language of the Tuareg. In ten years of tireless work he compiled an enormous four-volume French–Tuareg dictionary, a priceless work of linguistics and anthropology that preserved the culture of these nomads and is still consulted by researchers today. He knitted warm clothes and shared every grain of barley with the villagers in years of drought and famine. The Tuareg, once suspicious, came to see him as a “marabout”, a holy man who watched over the tribe.

Pope Benedict XVI beatified him in 2005. And on May 15, 2022, Pope Francis solemnly canonized Charles de Foucauld in Saint Peter’s Square. The Church celebrates him on December 1 each year.