BLESSED CHARLES DE FOUCAULD (1858-1916)
An Apostleship of Presence Philip J Smyth
Blessed Charles has been approved for canonisation by Pope Francis, although all canonisation ceremonies are presently paused because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Blessed Charles de Foucauld lived and died in obscurity. For someone born into the French aristocracy, the manner of his death was surprising, to say the least. Bound like a slave, he was shot through the head and killed by a 16-year old youth, who had taken fright while robbing Charles' desert hermitage at Tamanrasset. According to an eyewitness, as he fell to the ground, the Blessed Sacrament, which had been exposed in a small monstrance, was thrown out and fell down beside his body. The circumstances of his birth were a world away for this seemingly futile ending. Vicomte Charles Eugene de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg into a pious aristocratic French family – and promptly lost his faith at the age of 16. He had made his First Communion and been confirmed the previous year, and by all accounts had been filled with religious fervour. Then, in the course of a few months, it had all gone. Surrounded by scepticism, for it was the age of Renan, Taine, Anatole France, Nietzsche and Marx, the young adolescent willingly surrendered to the spirit of the time. His childhood, despite the death of his parents before he was six, had been a happy one, for he was brought up by his maternal grandfather to whom he was devoted. He spent part of every holiday with one of his aunts, whose daughter Marie, though eight years his senior, was to be, and was to remain humanly, the great love of his life. But in 1874 she married Vicomte de Bondy, and her departure for the Gironde, at a time when the young Charles was vulnerable, left him with the feeling that everything she had made him love was gone from him. He later wrote: ‘For 12 years I lived without any faith whatever: nothing seemed to me sufficiently proven ... my faith was quite dead’. His reaction was common enough, and very similar to the reaction of many men and women today, faced by a sceptical and secular society, and a spiritual emptiness in their personal lives. But the outcome for Charles was far from common. He was destined to be one of the most challenging explorers of his time, and a remarkably prophetic figure for our own troubled times. © Rabanus Flavus
The army officer
Statue of Blessed Charles de Foucauld in front of the church of Saint-Pierre-le-jeune in Strasbourg
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His last year at school was marked, he was to write later, by ‘all egoism, all vanity, all ungodliness, all desire for evil. I was like a madman’. He was finally expelled for laziness and insubordination. However, he was so keen to go to St Cyr, the military academy, that he became 82nd Oremus
November 2020
