Furthermore I count all things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ:

Charles Eugène de Foucauld, Viscount of Foucauld, a French soldier, libertine, adventurer and then monk, hermit, martyr and saint. One thinks of St Paul, St Augustine, St Mary Magdalene and the lives of so many converts. They suddenly meet the living God and their life changes dramatically; nothing else matters. “As soon as I believed in God, I understood that I could not do otherwise than to live for him alone.”

Bl Charles awakening from his slumbering youth, entered the Trappist order first in France and then at Akbès in Syria. Ever seeking greater humility and poverty, he served as caretaker for Poor Clares in Nazareth, founded of new religious order to evangelize “the furthest removed, the most abandoned” of the Sahara and finally retired as hermit in the high desert. He died a martyr and a saint.

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