The Catholic Weekly 5 July 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 12 NEWS 5, July, 2020 FEATURE B lessed Charles de Foucauld will soon be canonised. A lit- tle more than a cen- tury after his death, a miracle attributed to his intercession was officially approved by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in a decree signed by Pope Francis on 27 May. By the time of his death, de Foucauld had not won a single convert to the faith, yet he has gone on to have an extraor- dinary effect on the modern Catholic Church. Beatified by Benedict XVI in 2005, Blessed Charles is most- ly known for having lived as a hermit among the Tuareg in the Sahara, decades before the emergence of interfaith dia- logue with the 1961 declara- tion Nostra Aetate . His missionary zeal cost him his life. On 1 December 1916 Brother Charles of Jesus – the name he took for religious life - was assassinated by an armed group connected with the Senussi Bedouins who had encircled his hermitage of Tamanrasset, in southern Algeria. While World War I overshadowed the news of his death, he remains one of the most important religious figures of his time and was ¾ ¾ Solène Tadié described by Dominican the- ologian Yves Congar, together with St Thérèse of Lisieux, as one of the two “beacons lit by God on the threshold of the atomic century.” MIRACULOUS POWER OF PRAYER The celebration of the first centenary of his birth in heav- en, in 2016, showed the mag- nitude of his spiritual influ- ence on the Catholic world. Prayers seeking his canon- isation had begun to multiply worldwide—almost 100 years after his cause of beatification was opened in 1926. Novenas were being fol- lowed by thousands of faithful when a miracle attributed to his intercession took place in late November 2016. A French carpenter named Charle, who was working on the restoration of an old Catholic chapel in Saumur (western France, next to the cavalry school where Blessed Charles once studied), fell 16 metres to the floor and im- paled himself on a bench leg. The CEO of the renovation company, a practicing Catho- lic, was advised by a local par- ish priest to pray for the inter- cession of Foucauld, asking him to save Charle. In a few hours, a prayer chain involving the whole di- ocese was launched for the carpenter. While the doctors said that the violence of the impact should have ruptured Charle’s organs and killed him, he not only survived the accident but was up and walking six days later. “I saw the strength of com- munion of prayer, and I un- derstood that if some causes of canonisation stagnate, it is be- cause we don’t pray enough,” Father Bernard Ardura, presi- dent of the Pontifical Commit- tee of Historical Sciences and postulator of Blessed Charles’ cause of canonisation said, re- calling that prayer makes God answer by granting miracles through the intercession of saints. To this day, dozens of con- gregations, institutes of con- secrated life, communities, associations and lay faithful around the world have been inspired by de Foucauld’s spirituality, while his influ- ence continues to spread. “All these people are try- ing to live according to the message of brother Charles and radiate the Gospel, es- pecially in poor areas that are far from the Church,” Pierre Sourisseau, the archivist of Foucauld’s cause of canoni- sation and author of the most comprehensive biography available about the Trappist priest said. “Countless Chris- The tomb of Charles de Foucauld still sits in its own enclosure in El Ménia, Algeria. PHOTO:123RF/TYNRUD HERMIT of the SAHARA A century after his death as a martyr, the French cavalry officer-turned-priest who lived as a hermit among the Tuareg in the Algerian desert will be proclaimed a saint.