According to Yahoo! 7/25/2008, in concluding his remarks on Sunday, July 20, Pope Benedict XVI urged thousands of young Catholics “to beat back a ‘spiritual desert’ spreading through the modern world.”

“ Perhaps, it is better to become at least part-time pilgrims in another kind of desert,” I thought to myself, as I remembered another great friend of Catholic youth, who followed in the footsteps of Cardinal Cardijn of last week’s article; namely, Carlo Carretto, who served as National President of Catholic Youth in Italy from 1946-1952.

At the age of forty-four, he seemed to hear the Lord’s calling him to go into the desert, to take time out from his non-stop ministry, to pray and to love.

The laborer didn’t fully understand, but in faith he left Italy for North Africa, where he joined the Little Brothers and embraced the way of life of Charles de Foucauld, whose life has been described on this site, and can be found in the Archives.

Carretto, forever the dedicated disciple, shared his experiences in a book, called Letters from the Desert, which went into twenty-four editions in Italy, and has also been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Czech and in English in 1972, by Orbis Press in New York, with an introduction by Ivan Illich.

Ivan began by telling us that it was October, 1959, shortly after General Massu had taken command of Algeria, towards noon, when he reached Tamanrasset, deep in the Sahara. Without knowing a word of Arabic, he asked in vain about Carlo until some children heard him mention his name, and shouted gleefully, “Frere Carlo, Frere Carlo!” They grabbed Ivan’s hand and pulled him toward a shoemaker’s shop.

There, Carlo was busy cutting up old tires for indestructible sandals. Ivan wrote that for years he had tried not to think of his friend who had held a key post in Italy’s Catholic Action organization, and had led the young people in anti-communist politics under Pope Pius XII.

He feared that by then, Carlo would have become even more powerful as one of the clerical churchmen who dominated Christian Democratic politics in Italy.

Yet, there he was in his shoe shop, friend to children and cripples and pilgrims at the tomb of Charles de Foucauld, “the gourmet turned ascetic, the officer turned monk, the monk turned priest and hermit.”

He had died there in the adobe hut, now a chapel, because he had been asked to guard sixteen French rifles.

When they left the chapel, Carlo pointed to de Foucauld’s tomb stone and said, “If you want to live like Jesus you must accept being misunderstood like him.”

Illich described what Carlo taught him in that desert:

I came to experience the naked simplicity in the statements of his love for the Lord. I came to marvel at his lack of embarrassment at being judged childish when he said something true; when he was judged escapist because he refused to be militant.

Carlo installed Ivan in a cave below the peak of Asekrem, two days’ journey by donkey from the shop. The bed was of stone, protected from the icy winds, which blow without ceasing at several thousand feet in the Ahaggar mountains.

Illich described the spiritual atmosphere of the hermitage: “The Muslim shepherd’s song envelops the Franciscan tenderness of Italian in the austerity of unambiguous faith. The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible: the joyful acceptance of our uselessness. “ He concludes his introduction:

I hope they will open this book in an Anglo-American desert: a lonely flat in Watts or Kensington, the ward of a hospital, in an asylum or prison cell, or on a commuter train.

If you are so richly blessed as to discover the book at a garage sale or on the shelf of a parish library, or in a friend’s home, or from Orbis Press, you will come away with memories that will live as long as memories serve. One that haunts me thirty-some years after reading it goes like this:

When he reached El Abiod Sidi Seik to begin his novitiate preparation to join the Little Brothers, Carlo decided to cut the ties with the past, ties embodied in the thick notebook, containing thousands of addresses of his old friends. He had regretted not having been able to speak to each one upon leaving for his new life.

He took the address book and burnt it behind a dune during a day’s retreat. He tells us, “but burning an address is not the same thing as destroying friendship; on the contrary, I have never loved nor prayed so much for my friends as in the solitude of the desert. I saw their faces, I felt their problems, their sufferings, sharpened by the distance between us.” And he tells of what he would do if we should happen by his desert home:

We’d sit down on the sand and through the night we’d tell each other the story of these past years of our lives, of the stages we’d reached, the trials we’d undergone. I think that the morning star would find us still talking.

And I am sure that some time during the night, under those bright stars, in quiet tones of regret and sorrow, he would tell a story I could never forget, and I think it will become a part of your memory bank, as well:

While driving his jeep through the furrows in the sand, following a truck,Carlo came upon great rocks, and parked in their shade. He took a blanket for his head, and placed a second one beside him. It was the second one that disturbed his rest.

The evening before, he had passed through Irfog, a small village of Negroes, ex-slaves of the Tuareg, where a crowd of people surrounded the jeep to receive the treasures which desert travelers bring with them: a little tea, medicines or letters.

Among them was old Kada, trembling with cold. Carlo thought of giving him one of his blankets, but didn’t do so. That next evening, he had a difficult time sleeping, thinking of Kada,, and that only a month before, a Tuareg, in the middle of his siesta, had been crushed by a falling slab.

Carlo got up to check on the boulder above him, and found it steady enough. On the sand, he fell asleep and dreamed of the rock moving, then falling upon him. He couldn’t move, but opened his eyes to see Kada shivering in front of him at Irafog, and tried to stretch out his arm to give him the extra blanket, but the stone prevented his doing so, and he understood clearly that purgatory’s suffering was that the soul was “no longer to have the possibility of doing what before one could and should have done.”

He described his state of mind:

The presence of the blanket denied to Kada the evening before told me that I had still a long way to go. If I were capable of passing by a brother who was shivering with cold, how should I be capable of dying for him in imitation of Jesus who died for us all? In this way I understood that I was lost.

For me, that tract of desert between Tit and Silet is still the place of my purgatory, where I was forced to meditate seriously about the ways of God, and I knew: Love transforms us slowly into God.

Home

Archives