Many Catholics today have heard---at least in outline--- the story of the "Universal Brother," Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), the Frenchman who, after living the life of an aristocratic dandy as a youth, with all that that entails, at age 28 encountered Jesus Christ in a life-changing way and would eventually spend the rest of his life in imitation of Jesus in service to Muslims of the Touareg tribe in Tamanrasset, in the midst of the Sahara desert, southern Algeria.

Charles had previously been acquainted with the austere beauty and mystery of the desert through French army life, and, after his first unsuccessful tour, he won a measure of fame by mapping uncharted territory in Morocco, being awarded a medal for the work by the French Geographic Society. It was at that time that he came to admire the exotic Islam of the desert and, for a time, according to his early biographer, even considered converting to that religion

READ THE REST ...