by Gabriele Cantaluppi
That day at the end of October 1886, the twenty-eight-year-old second lieutenant Charles de Foucauld who crossed the door of the church of Saint Augustine in Paris did not notice the splendid and majestic eclectic Romanesque-Renaissance architecture of the building, intent as he was on seeking reason within himself of the profound questions that tormented him.
Two years earlier, having returned to France from a scientific exploration in Morocco, where he had been struck by the faith of Muslims, he had confessed: «The sight of these people who live in the continuous presence of God made me glimpse something bigger and more truer than worldly occupations."
Disbelief had left room for doubt and research: he gradually realized that God is not an idea to be conquered but a person to be met... "My God, if you exist, let me know you." When he left that temple he was no longer the same person: he, kneeling in the confessional, was transformed by grace.
In his writings, he recalls having told Abbé Henri Huvelin that he had not come to confession, but that he hoped for clarifications on the Catholic religion. Instead, «by letting me enter his confessional, you have given me all the goods, my God; if there is joy in heaven at the sight of a sinner converting, there was some when I entered that confessional."
Up until that moment, and for twelve years, he had remained "without denying anything and without believing anything, despairing of the truth, and not even believing in God, since no proof seemed clear enough to me", he who in childhood had been accustomed to a Jesuit Catholic education.
He was born in Strasbourg, then in German territory, on 15 September 1858 and his mother had raised him in a serious and religious way, but she had died when he was almost sixty. The following year it was the turn of his father, who had long been suffering from a mental illness. His maternal grandfather took care of him, a retired colonel who, with the annexation of Alsace to Germany, following the war of 1870, he chose to take French nationality and moved to Nancy.
He continued his studies in that city, without ever applying himself too much. He received his first communion and confirmation, but then, around 1874, he lost his faith. His was not anticlericalism, rather a religious crisis that marked the detachment from the believing attitude of childhood. He will recognize that the main origin of this attitude was the familiarity with literature of the Enlightenment, in which religion, in its dogmas and its ministers, was ridiculed and questioned.
At the age of twenty he was expelled from the preparatory school for the military academy of Saint-Cyr for "discipline aggravated by bad conduct". He still managed to win the competition, so as not to displease his grandfather. Upon the latter's death in February 1878, he inherited his estate and, bored with military life, instead amused himself by organizing refined dinners and frequenting high society. Meanwhile he went to the Cavalry school in Saumur, where he became a second lieutenant, although last on the promotion list. His passion for travel led him to clandestinely explore an unknown area of Morocco, earning a gold medal from the Paris Geography Society.
In a meditation dated 8 November 1897 he rereads his past life: «every good, every good feeling, every good appearance, seem to have radically disappeared from my soul: only selfishness, sensuality, pride and the vices that make their procession. My God, forgive me! Pardon! Pardon!". From that moment: «As soon as I believed that God exists I understood that I couldn't do anything other than live only for him». Returning to his homeland, he entered the Trappa Notre-Dame des Neiges and was then sent to that of Akbès, in Syria. However, he realized that in the Trappa it was not possible «to lead the life of poverty, of abjection, of effective detachment, of humility, I would even say of recollection of Our Lord in Nazareth. I long for Nazareth." Thus he left Trappa and in 1897 left for the Holy Land, living for three years in Nazareth in the shadow of the monastery of the Poor Clares, in a hermitage hut: «I want to lead the life that I glimpsed, perceived walking through the streets of Nazareth , where Our Lord, a poor craftsman lost in humility and darkness, rested his feet." This structure was later entrusted to us Guanellian fathers in 1975, upon invitation from the Custody of the Holy Land. It is now home to the Holy Family School, a rehabilitation facility that welcomes 140 disabled children every day.
Ordained a priest in the diocese of Viviers, he discovered the connection between the "sacrament of the altar" and the "sacrament of the brother": even before his ordination he had asked for the possibility of living the priesthood in the Algerian Sahara and bearing witness to the love of Jesus "not with the word but with goodness". He settled in the Algerian Sahara, "among the most lost sheep, the most abandoned". He wrote in those days: «From 4.30 in the morning to 20.30 in the evening, I don't stop talking, seeing people: slaves, poor, sick, soldiers, travellers, curious people. […] I want to accustom all the inhabitants of the earth to consider me as their brother, the universal brother." A few years later he decided to move further south, among the Tuareg, to Tamanrasset, "where there is no garrison, no telegraph, no Europeans".
His time was divided between prayer, relationships with the indigenous people, whom he helped and supported in many ways, and studies of the Tuareg language: he also wrote a Tuareg-French dictionary. He spent long hours in adoring silence before the Eucharist, but opened the door to anyone who knocked, especially the most miserable, the slaves, and redeemed some of them.
Then he fell ill: «something in his heart» he wrote: his life became suspended and everything depended on the good hearts of his friends: «The Tuareg searched for all the goats within a four kilometer radius to give me some milk ».
In order to remain with them, he agreed not to celebrate mass when there were no Christians present and for years he suffered from not even being able to keep the Eucharist: he himself would become broken bread!
On December 1, 1916, towards the evening, he was working as usual, but he heard a knock on the door: it was El Madani, a man who had often benefited. He opened the door quietly, but was immediately dragged out and tied, hand and foot together, with camel reins; Meanwhile other men began to plunder the house.
Suddenly, the noise of the arrival of some soldiers on dromedary backs, coming to collect the mail, alarmed the boy, about fifteen years old, who had him in custody: a rifle shot was fired and the hostage fell to the ground. It was the first Friday of the month.