Père de Foucauld and His Fraternities

Extract

When a saint reaches universality, his original background and personal characteristics sink into comparative unimportance. God’s possession of him has carried him beyond these things. Now, Charles de Foucauld, Brother Charles of Jesus, came from a very old family of the French nobility. His was a rich heritage of ancestral virtues and heroic chivalry. He himself was an officer and an explorer. He was thus quite thoroughly not only a man of his country, but a man of a particular period of his country’s history as well. In short, nothing would have seemed to have destined him in any particular way for a role as world-wide as the one we now know he was to have. Yet, once converted, he gave himself so utterly to our Lord, and his life turned into one so in keeping with the Gospel, that the witness he bore has in fact become universal. In other words, he became like a ‘little brother of Jesus’, as we say, and consequently, as he used to put it himself, a ‘universal little brother’.

After seven years generously devoted to life in a Trappist cloister, he felt himself irresistibly impelled towards a very literal imitation of Jesus working at Nazareth. He therefore set out on his quest in the self-chosen abasement of an all-but- penniless vagabond. From then on, he was to lead, first, the life of a domestic servant in Nazareth, devoting every hour he could spare from his chores to adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.