In the Desert

On the edge of the Sahara Desert, some 400 miles southeast of Algiers, bandits swept down on a truck filled with food one day last week and killed two of the men in the cab. For one of them, this sudden, senseless death in the desert was an end for which he was prepared. Maurice Tourvieille, 25, was a Little Brother of Jesus, and such a manner of dying is neither unexpected nor direly feared among the followers of Pere Foucauld, a martyr who one day may be accounted one of the saints of the 20th century.

Charles-Eugene, Vicumte de Foucauld (TIME, May 4, 1953), grew to man's estate in a manner far from saintly. Born in Strasbourg in 1858 to a rich, aristocratic family, young Foucauld awed his classmates at St. Cyr and at cavalry school with his man-of-the-worldly ways. Wrote future General Victor d'Urbal: "Anyone who has not seen Foucauld in his room, in white flannel pajamas, comfortably ensconced on a chaise longue or a fine armchair, eating delicious foie gras washed down with an excellent cham pagne, reading Aristophanes in a de luxe edition . . . cannot form a proper idea of a man who knows how to enjoy life."

A Gallant Name. In a single year Cadet Foucauld spent 21 days in simple arrest, 45 days in disciplinary arrest; he graduated 87th in a class of 87. He was cashiered from his regiment for taking his mistress Mimi along with him to Algeria. But later, when his old outfit, the 4th Hussars, ran into sticky fighting against the Arabs. Foucauld tossed Mistress Mimi aside, wangled reinstatement, and made a gallant name for himself. He never went back to his foie gras and champagne. Instead, at 29. he returned to the church, joined the Trappists, then decided that the Trappist austerities were not strict enough. He went to Nazareth where he became a handyman, living in harsh poverty, with fasting and prayer. His superiors were soon treating him as a living saint. Ordained (1901), Foucauld went to live among the Arabs of North Africa, who respected him as a holy man.

One night in 1916 he was writing in the mud shelter he had built himself among the Tuaregs, when a band of marauders hauled him outdoors and shot him. Almost 40 years before, he had written: "Think that you are going to be martyred, stripped of everything, stretched out on the ground, naked, unrecognizable, covered with blood and wounds, violently and horribly murdered . . . and hope that this will happen today."

Imitation of Christ. Pere Foucauld had dreamed of founding a religious order, but he died alone, without baptizing more than three or four converts in his entire life. In 1933 five students in the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux decided to found an order based on his austere rule of "extreme poverty in everything." In Algeria, on the edge of the Sahara at El-Abiodh-Sidi-Cheikh, the first novitiate of the Petits Freres de Jesus was opened. Six years later an order of women, the Petites Soeurs de Jesus, was founded.

Today, in 50 countries, there are 200 Petits Freres (both priests and lay brothers bear the same title) and 480 Petites Soeurs in groups of twos and threes in the poorest sections of wherever they happen to be. One room is always consecrated as a chapel, and an extra bed is reserved for a homeless visitor. Their uniform is the dress of the poor with a brown cross pinned to it. Their work is the most menial labor available to support them.

In Concarneau, France, three Little Brothers live as seamen, another as a factory hand. In Switzerland a group of Little Sisters live as inmates in women's prisons. In Nome, Alaska, Little Sisters are learning how to dress furs so that they can live among the Eskimos; in Chicago some live in a Negro district.

And in the wind-scoured, lunar land scape of the Sahara, where Pere Foucauld lived and died, both Little Sisters and Little Brothers in blue Tuareg cloaks tend flocks 'of goats and live on dried tomatoes and peppers, honey, dates and figs. They make no effort to evangelize, rely instead on the power of their example to point to Christianity.

One of these exemplars is Petit Frere Guy, who was once a Trappist like Pere Foucauld. To a rare visitor Frere Guy explained the difference between France's worker priests (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950 et seq.) and the followers of Pere Foucauld: "The worker priests became workers in order to approach the laboring class and win them back to the church. The Little Brothers and Little Sisters become work ers primarily to imitate Christ, who was a worker for 30 years."

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