UPDATE ON A FAVORITE SAINT

 

 

Pope Francis will canonize BLESSED CHARLES de FOUCAULD,  (See Blog  March  2013) considered to be one of the pioneers of interreligious dialogue, together with six other Blesseds, during a Canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on 15 May.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. It follows the Ordinary Public Consistory of 3 May 2021, whereby the Pope had authorized the canonizations, without however setting a date for the ceremony due to the health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Blessed Charles de Foucauld, born in 1858, was a French aristocrat and religious, whose work and writings led to the founding of the Congregation of the Little Brothers of Jesus. During his adventurous life, he was a Cavalry Officer in the French Army, and then an explorer and geographer before becoming a Catholic priest and hermit who lived among the Tuareg in Algeria’s Sahara Desert. 

He lived a life of prayer, meditation and adoration, in the incessant desire to be, for each person, a "universal brother", a living image of the love of Jesus. On the evening of December 1, 1916, he was killed by bandits.

At his beatification in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI said that as a priest, Foucauld “put the Eucharist and the Gospel at the center of his life.”

“He discovered that Jesus — who came to unite Himself to us in our humanity — invites us to that universal brotherhood which he later experienced in the Sahara, and to that love of which Christ set us the example,” Pope Benedict said.