Stone & Incense Search
Start hereCurious, or no faithEvangelical, Pentecostal or ProtestantFrom another faithSomeone I love is CatholicBecoming CatholicI was Catholic once Today in the ChurchLibraryHard questionsVoices of the revivalTake the next stepAboutSources & methodSupport the site
The saints

St. Charles de Foucauld

A spoiled French officer and explorer who became a hermit priest among the Tuareg.

Feast: 1 December (date from the Roman Martyrology; not on the universal calendar) · 1858 to 1916 · The modern era · Strasbourg, Nazareth and the Sahara

Read the story 1 min read
A plain typographic plate: St. Charles de Foucauld, with the feast day.

Typographic plate by Stone & Incense: we found no public-domain image of this saint we could verify.

Home / The saints / St. Charles de Foucauld

Tamanrasset, Algeria, 1916

Charles was a rich, lazy, party-loving officer in the French army who lost his faith as a teenager.1

Exploring Morocco, he was moved by the prayer of Muslims and began to search for God.1

He went to confession in Paris, and said that as soon as he believed there was a God, he knew he could only live for Him.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers him as the hermit of the Sahara and universal brother.

01St. Charles de Foucauld

Universal brother

He lived as a poor worker in Nazareth, became a priest, and settled among the Tuareg in the Sahara.1

He wanted to be a universal brother, and he was killed at his hermitage in 1916.1

Live it this week

Pray the prayer of abandonment

Charles wrote a prayer handing his whole life to the Father. Find it and pray it every morning this week, slowly.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Charles de Foucauld”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.