This Sunday Francisco will canonize Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), a saint spiritually as fruitful after his death as he was unsuccessful in life. explains this paradox Margarita Saldanagraduated in Journalism and Dogmatic Theology and author of several books: Saint Joseph: the eyes of the entrails, Land of God: a spirituality for everyday life either Inhabited routine: hidden life of Jesus and believing daily life.
To which is added a very recent one: The unfinished brother. Charles de Foucauld (Sal Terrae).
-From where do you approach his figure?
I belong to the spiritual family of Charles de Foucauldas a consecrated laywoman in the first feminine branch, founded in 1933, the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In addition, I am lucky to be part of a research team which has spent more than twenty years delving into the life and writings of Charles de Foucauld, particularly through unpublished texts.
Margarita Saldaña (Madrid, 1972) is a consecrated laywoman. She works in a palliative care clinic, work that she combines with spiritual accompaniment, retreats and training.
»This double perspective, one more charismatic and the other more intellectual, opens up a great horizon of understanding for me of a very complex character, whose existential trajectory harbors a highly topical message for today’s believer.
-Isn’t a French saint who lived between the 19th and 20th centuries far from the contemporary believer?
-The saints have a permanent actuality, which consists in their capacity to to have allowed grace to work. In this sense, Carlos de Foucauld is extraordinarily close to us. From his paths always open and his shadows never resolved, he tells us that it is possible to grow each day in an authentic relationship with God and with others. He, who wanted to be a “universal brother”, discovers and shows that the way to become brothers to all does not consist in moral perfection, but in the sustained openness of our fragility to the work of God in our smallness.
-Carlos de Foucauld is known as “universal brother”, and this is how Pope Francis proposes him at the end of the encyclical Fratelli tutti. Isn’t this “title” in contradiction with the image of “unfinished brother” that you use?
-More than in contradiction, these two images are in deep continuity. When in 1901 he arrived in the desert ordained a priest, Carlos de Foucauld began to feel the desire to be everyone’s brother, but he progressively discovered that the key to this relationship did not lie with him, but rather with others who recognized him as a brother or not. . Universal brotherhood will be a vital project that will pull him further and further, that will lead him to look for people more abandoned. And, at the same time, it will be a project that will never come to an end, because Carlos experiences limits within himself that make this relationship difficult, and also because his founding ideas are not successful and he dies without partners. In some way, Charles de Foucauld’s intuitions were realized after his death, through his great spiritual family and also of that spirit of “exit” that Pope Francis wishes to inject into the entire Church.
-In your book you use the terms “exploration” and “irradiation” to refer to the life of Carlos de Foucauld. What do these terms express?
-The life of Carlos de Foucauld can be read from these two keys, which are also complementary. On one side, your itinerary will pass through many different landscapes: of noble origin, lovingly educated by an extended family after the death of his parents, stops believing, joins the army and immediately goes to the reserves, makes a scientific trip through Morocco, recovers the Christian faith, spends seven years in la Trapa, seeks radicalism from the margins in Nazareth, is ordained a priest and, in recent years, settles in North Africa and goes to meet the Tuaregs.
Charles de Foucauld, with one of the children whom he freed from slavery. Photo: @FondsFoucauld – Diocese of Viviers.
»On the other hand, these very different stages lead him to explore other interior and unprecedented landscapes: his own desires and limits, the secrets of the relationship, the meaning of the Eucharist, the value of presence as a space of mission, etc. In those places, his life is simply “irradiation” of Jesusproclamation of the Gospel more by testimony than by word.
-Charles de Foucauld died without having founded anything and without making practically any conversion. This apparent failure, do you have something to tell us today?
-This “apparent failure” is directly connected with two mysteries of the life of Christ that burn in the heart of Charles de Foucauld. The first of them is the ineffectiveness of Nazareth, where the Son of God spends most of his human existence immersed in the banality of everyday life. In Nazareth nothing extraordinary happens and, nevertheless, Jesus is already saving the world through intimate communion with the human being. This Nazarene life is not a failure, nor a useless phase, but a place of revelation.
“Something similar happens with the paschal mystery: Jesus dies alone. The cross is another place of revelation. These two mysteries give meaning to the existence of Charles de Foucauld and ours: even if our life does not give the “results” that we would like, it can be a space of salvation if we allow ourselves to dwell and work for God.
-What message does Charles de Foucauld have for the contemporary Church?
-A saint is a witness, a companion on the way, an older brother. Saint Charles de Foucauld insistently calls us to return to the Gospel, to fix our eyes on Jesus and let ourselves be carried away by the passion of his Heart: this world cracked by injustice, this world thirsty for salvation, this world that God has loved so much.
»Charles de Foucauld invites us to do not live dependent on the figures or the results, no longer be afraid of wasting life to the hilt, because the authentic efficacy is that of the grain of wheat and the handful of yeast. Charles de Foucauld’s testimony is good news for the whole Church, for all the baptized. His canonization, more than “raising him to the altars” lowers him even more to the earth to walk with us in the footsteps of Jesus.
«Carlos de Foucauld invites us not to live pending the figures or the results»