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Pope Francis has credited St. Charles de Foucauld with helping him to find “a way of Christian life that was simpler, less Pelagian, closer to the Lord.”
In his continuing general audience series on notable models of evangelization, the Pope turned to de Foucauld precisely as an example of someone who “fell head over heels in love” with Christ.
This “losing his heart to Jesus of Nazareth” was St. Charles’ secret, the Pope said.
Brother Charles thus reminds us that the first step in evangelizing is to have Jesus inside one’s heart; it is to “fall head over heels” for him. If this does not happen, we can hardly show it with our lives. Instead, we risk talking about ourselves, the group to which we belong, a morality or, even worse, a set of rules, but not about Jesus, his love, his mercy. […] I think that today it would be good for each one of us to ask him- or herself: “Do I have Jesus at the center of my heart? Have I ‘lost my head’ a bit for Jesus?”
St. Charles’ love for Christ led him from attraction to imitation. He went to the Holy Land and then the Sahara Desert, all in a quest to know and imitate Jesus better.
Then, the Pope said, he “lets Jesus act silently, convinced that the ‘Eucharistic life’ evangelizes. Indeed, he believes that Christ is the first evangelizer. And so he remains in prayer at Jesus’ feet, before the Tabernacle, for a dozen hours a day, sure that the evangelizing force resides there and feeling that it is Jesus who will bring him close to so many distant brothers.”
With this, the Pope repeated an appeal he has made several times recently: for a more Eucharistic Church, for greater faith in the Eucharistic, and more time in Adoration.
And do we, I ask myself, believe in the power of the Eucharist? Does our going out to others, our service, find its beginning and its fulfillment there, in adoration? I am convinced that we have lost the sense of adoration: We must regain it, starting with us consecrated persons, bishops, priests, nuns and all consecrated persons. “Waste” time before the tabernacle, regain the sense of adoration.
And today we celebrate...