In Rome on November 13, 2005, the Catholic Church beatified a French viscount, Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) whose extraordinary life of loving Christian example has given rise to a dozen new religious communities worldwide, and to hundreds of fraternities of laymen inspired by his life and writings.

       Successively a French army officer, an explorer, Trappist, priest, hermit, ethnographer of the Tuareg people, writer and martyr, he baptized only two converts in his entire career, and failed to attract a single follower to his Rule.

       Like the desert, Brother Charles' life is a fabric of such extremes and contrasts. Though he graduated Saint-Cyr at the bottom of his class, he soon after earned the Gold Medal of the French Geographic Society for his covert walking survey of hostile Morocco. And although the affluence of Charles' younger years prompted an agnostic, bon vivant lifestyle, his restless search for God was answered by a lightning conversion. Later, his eremitical life was so severe that no candidate could live it with him. Born to aristocracy, Brother Charles sought to share Jesus' "lowest place", a "hidden" workingman's life among the poor, the alienated, the despised and forgotten. Following "in the footprints of Jesus", he did and endured everything "...for the sake of God alone".

       Brother Charles of Jesus was shot and killed by a militant young Tuareg recruit on December 1, 1916, at Tamanrasset, Algeria. He is buried beneath a wooden cross at the desert oasis of El Golea.