One of the most remarkable careers in the Catholic world of the last hundred years is that of Charles de Foucauld, the soldier explorer, who as a young man, lost, or imagined that he had lost his faith, and after some years of dissolute living was, with dramatic suddenness, brought back to the practice of his religion by Abbe Huvelin, a renowned director of souls. From that day onwards his life was to be a spiritual pilgrimage - as a Trappist of Notre Dame des Neiges and in Asia Minor, as a convent gardener in Nazareth, and finally as a solitary in the Sahara, where he met his death at the hands of a band of raiding Senussi during the first World War. He appears as a strange figure in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Living in great austerity as a hermit in the Sahara, hoping for the companions who never came, helping the Tuareg to the utmost of his powers, thus living, what he preached, the lesson of love; to convert people we must love them. That was the meaning of his life, summed up in his own phrase - "To proclaim the Gospel by my life." That, too, is the purpose of the Little Brothers who, after his death, were founded in the Sahara, and have now spread to many parts of the world. This book with its fascinating account of an interesting, enigmatic character, written for this year's centenary of Charles de Foucauld's birth, devotes its last chapters to an account of these posthumous followers of his who are one of the manifestations of the vitality of the Church in the modern world.
