“God uses adverse winds to blow us into port.”

Charles de Foucauld

Charles de Foucauld, hermit, servant of the poor
1 December 1916
Charles Eugene, viscount of Foucauld, was born in 1858. He served as a French Army officer in Algieria beginning in 1881, and prepared a mapping of oases in Morocco in 1883. In 1886 he underwent a religious conversion, and in 1890 he joined a Trappist monastery, but soon left to become a solitary hermit in Palestine. In 1901 he went to Algeria, where he eventually settled at Tamanrasset and there lived the life of a missionary … [More]