Charles de Foucauld" "
On Sunday 13 November Pope Benedict XVI will beatify Charles de Foucauld, the great French explorer and witness to the Gospel among the Tuareg of the Sahara. Born at Strasbourg on 15 September 1858, he led a roving life that led him to the countries of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. Then followed his religious conversion and a journey to the Holy Land that profoundly marked his life. He studied for the priesthood, was ordained in 1901, and then chose to return to the Sahara “to imitate the hidden life of Jesus at Nazareth”. He first settled at Bèni-Abbès and then at Tamanrasset, in order to live among the Tuareg. He studied Arabic and the Berber language and began a detailed philological study of the language of the Tuareg, which led him to write a grammar and compile a French-Tuareg/Tuareg-French dictionary. The Berbers called him “marabut”, which means “holy man” or “hermit” in the language of the Maghreb. He died alone, on 1st December 1916, after being wounded by gunfire during a skirmish caused by rebels of the Hoggar. But his death did not go unheeded: it inspired a spiritual family throughout the world that now consists of 11 religious congregations and 8 associations of spiritual life. It had been the intention of John Paul II to beatify Charles de Foucauld on 15 May this year, on the day of Pentecost, but the Pope’s death led to the postponement of the beatification to 13 November. “Father Charles writes the prior of Bose, Father ENZO BIANCHI died alone, just as he had lived alone, in the desert in which he had felt himself accepted and cherished”. “He died alone, but his seed, dropped into the ground, would bear copious fruit, so that, like the blood of the martyrs, it would become the seed of a multitude of Christians who would recognise in his spiritual face the traces of a close resemblance to Christ: and today, in joy and thanksgiving, this same recognition is embraced by the whole Church. Yes, hidden from the eyes of the world, the life and death of Father Charles represents a wonderful image of Christian discipleship, of the “blood offered with the whole heart and shed for love of Jesus”: the blood, pulse of life, that tells of the universal love of the Father in a universal language”.
