Blessed Charles de Foucauld - Badal

Charles de Foucauld - Badal

·      Birth: September 15, 1858    

·      Death:  December 1, 1916.  He lived for 58 years

·      Personality:  He was Proud, Aesthete, Temperamental, Pleasure-Loving, Hardheaded, Impetuous and Self-Centered.   But He was also Sensitive, Generous, Kind, Honest, and Single-minded.

·      Career:  He was A French Military Officer, Explorer, Monk, Porter at Nazareth, Priest and a Little Brother to the Tuaregs.

1.     He began as an agnostic.  In his unbelief and as a colonial soldier to Africa, He became “captive” of the black continent and fascinated by Islam.  He became truly present in the continent – explored it and learned its peoples and languages.

2.     He came back to his Catholic Faith through Islam.  It was a powerful experience of conversion.  He lived in utter simplicity, became truly poor and lived a monastic life.  He went back to the East, the Holy Land and became a Porter at Nazareth.

3.     He discovered FRATERNITY as the essence of Jesus’ Caritas.

4.     From the Holy Land, He went back to Africa … to be a “little” brother among the Tuaregs… and spent a monastic life almost like a hermit in the desert… in prayer and “welcome” to the pilgrims.

5.     Killed in his hut…

6.     Beatified – December 16, 2005 in Rome, Italy

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His friend and mentor, who he referred to as an “older brother”, guided Louis Massignon’s Badaliyya Prayer. His own letters to the Badaliyya members included many references to Foucauld and the prayer of Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament was included in every gathering, as it now is for every gathering of Blessed Charles’ many lay and religious fraternities world wide.

I am quoting from a series of articles that appeared this week on a French Internet site, that inspired my enthusiasm once again for a spiritual legacy that has far reaching implications for our own Badaliyya prayer.

Bishop Claude Rault who serves in the Algerian Sahara writes: “Charles de Foucauld was not a “perfect” human being, far from it. Nevertheless, his radical choice in service of God and his “beloved Jesus”, his desire to join with the farthest away and poorest of peoples, his hours spent in prayer in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, his days spent in welcoming everyone who came as a “brother”, his spiritual wandering in quest of his vocation, and so many other aspects of his personality that make him close to us and accessible, at last, a saint within our reach, even if he remains... inimitable! And yet, there are religious families of men and women born from the profound intuition of Charles, “little brothers” and “little sisters” spread out in the most remote corners throughout the world.... These spiritual children of the “universal brother” have made their priority the poorest populations, the most abandoned, farthest from society, sometimes to the limit of the possible....

There are also thousands of priests and laypersons who have discovered through his message a way of living the Gospel more fully to the ends of the earth, in fraternal sharing, caring for the smallest among us, and in silent adoration. There are finally all those who have discovered the grandeur of this personality and its spiritual dimension who do not belong to his spiritual family nor even to his religion. Blessed Charles, who through his trials and errors, his thirst for solitude and for relationships, his great love of God and of his neighbor, still shows us today the way to universal brother/sisterhood! He invites us to leave our frivolousness, our reassuring boundaries, our small spiritual comfort, to rise to the numbers of challenges that he confronted without always succeeding. It is up to us to continue the path that he outlined for us”.
August 30, 2005.

Brother Charles lifelong inspiration was what he called his “Nazareth”, living the hidden life of the worker, Jesus of Nazareth, before his public ministry began.

Monsignor Maurice Bouvier, postulator of the Cause for the Beatification of Brother Charles, member of the Priest’s Fraternity Jesus-Caritas, described the process in detail and wrote: “Nazareth has a permanent message for the Church. The New Alliance does not begin in the Temple, nor on the Holy Mountain, but in the small house of the Virgin, in the house of the worker, in the places forgotten by pagan Galilee, from which no one would expect anything good. It is only from there that the Church will find a new beginning and healing. She will never provide a true response to the revolution in our century against the powers of wealth if, in her own heart, Nazareth is not a lived reality”.

Peace to you.

Badaliyya Cotabato

October 2014