Friendships. At times, they can become so intertwined with our lives we cannot recall ever having been without their inspiring companionship, which is how I suspect millions of Catholics and non-Catholics, including Muslims, feel about the recently beatified nobleman- turned desert priest, Viscount Charles de Foucauld.

By chance, on the evening of November 13th, I turned the TV channel to find St. Peter’s Basilica filling the screen to celebrate the beatification of two nuns and Charles de Foucauld. The scene consisted of cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, mighty politicians, officers in full regalia, and wealthy aristocrats in tuxedos and lovely gowns. After the Mass, Pope Benedict XVI arrived to pronounce the beatification.

Among the congregation, there were Charles de Foucauld’s followers, the Little Brothers of Jesus, and the Little Sisters of Jesus in their simple habits, which had made them one with the poor in the Sahara desert, and, eventually, in many corners of the globe.

Perhaps, the setting was fitting for the nuns. I’m not familiar with their stories, but it failed to convey to the congregation and the TV audience the life-long struggle of Foucauld to follow Christ in poverty and obscurity, and his determination to live among the Muslims as their brother.

How proper it would have been, and with modern technology, how effortless a matter, to have held a simple ceremony, broadcast to the entire world from Africa’s Tamanrasset, where Foucauld met his death in 1916 by a bullet at the hands of a boy, accompanied by robbers, convinced that the destitute missionary was hiding abundant gold and silver. When Charles settled in Tamanrasset, he had other treasures in mind:

By grace of Divine Well-beloved Jesus, I am able to settle in Tamanrasset or wherever else I like in the Hoggar, to have a house and garden there and to put down roots forever. I choose
Tamanrasset , a mountain village of some twenty firesides in the heart of the Hoggar, the seat of the principal Dag-Rasli tribe, far from any important center. I doubt if it shall ever see a garrison, the telegraph, or another European resident. There will be no mission here for a long time. So I have picked this forsaken place to settle.

In his will, Charles had also asked that he be buried there, with a simple, wooden cross to mark his grave. However, in 1927, when proceedings began for his beatification, the Apostolic Prefect of Ghardai, Monseigneur Gustave Nouet, decided that the grave should be moved to consecrated ground near the White Father’s mission at El Golea. The tomb is an inclined, massive , six-ton slab of travertine erected by the Catholics of Nancy, city of his youth. Behind it stands an immense Crucifix.

The people meant well, of course, but to anyone who has studied the holy man’s life, that slab of marble is like a sacrilege, burying what was more beautiful than any marble could be, a life dedicated to his people, in simplicity,and poverty.

He asked for nothing in life; he asked for obscurity in death. Yes, he is now known the world over, and that is the way it should be, but one day, in respect for his dying wish, the marble should be removed and a simple, wooden cross erected in its place, as a message to all that the Christ of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Calvary and an empty tomb was sufficient to change a worldly, self-centered, proud, anti-religious man into a lover of God and his people.

Twenty years later, the seed that had fallen into the ground began to flourish in 1933, when five young priests from Paris decided to live among the natives the traditional poverty of Nazareth.

Marion Mill Preminger, in her splendid biography, The Sands of Tamanrasset, explained that “ they were drawn by the desert, as was Father de Foucaauld, because it is in the desert that man most feels his insignificance; that in the desert the material things which separate him from God disappear most rapidly.”

The priests began their religious life in the military post at El Abiodh-Sidi-Sheikh in Southern Oran, armed with mimeographed copies of the founder’s Rule for the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – 1899 version.

However, the religious did not earn their own living, as the Rule stipulated, but depended upon contributions from families and friends. During World War II, they began to take their places with their brothers in the slums of Lyons, among the fishermen of Brittany, in the shanty towns of North Africa, and, later, in the mines of Peru and with the metal workers of Damascus. There are now fraternities in scores of countries, but the novices always begin religious life in Africa.

The Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, founded in 1933, wear the insignia of the Sacred Heart with superimposed Cross in red on their white robes. They work with their hands, nursing the sick, and helping the poor and oppressed from Tamanrasset to Trivandrum, in Southern India. A third of their day is spent in contemplation.

When Marion Mill Preminger told her American friends she was going to write a biography of Charles de Foucauld, they asked, “Who is Pere de Foucauld?”

The French asked, “Why another Foucauld biography?”

Preminger felt that, although thirty-odd books had already been written about the holy man, a half-dozen available in English, she felt that there were still intelligent, well-read people who had not heard of him, and surely, for them, his life needed retelling.

Ultimately, she confessed, “but my reason for writing the book remains the same: I not only admire and revere Charles de Foucauld; I love him.”

As do many of us, Marion.

(Next week: Conversion from playboy to a man of prayer and self-sacrifice)

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