It was November 2016. Young Charle was working on the restoration of a church’s ceiling structure in Saumur, France, when he fell some 50 feet before impaling himself on an upturned pew. The young man got up with a piece of wood piercing his torso. He was rushed to hospital, but was found not to have injuries to any vital organ. He later left the hospital with no serious sequelae.
For his employer, a practicing Catholic, only a miracle could have saved his employee from death. At the hospital, he told the young man about Charles de Foucauld. It was the beginning of a story that would lead the carpenter to testify in the canonization process of the holy hermit.
Four years later, his survival was officially attributed to the intercession of Charles de Foucauld. On May 15, 2022, the young carpenter was in St. Peter's Square in Rome for the canonization of the “universal brother.”
Charle's story is all the more disconcerting because he is not baptized and has no faith. “I wasn't a believer before my fall, and I'm still not,” he admitted to us a few days before the Roman celebration.
And yet, the bond between him and Charles de Foucauld endures. Indeed, it was he who created a reliquary that will be installed in a French church in Rome in early February.
Here is a sketch of the design:
A second-class relic in the heart of Rome
In the heart of the Eternal City lies a little church with a long name: Church of St. Claude and St. Andrew of the Burgundians.
Charles de Foucauld came to pray here for several days on his return from the Holy Land at the beginning of the last century. “It was the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament who found me this nest that the good Lord had prepared for me: I am at the door of these good Fathers, who have the Blessed Sacrament exposed day and night, and I enjoy their chapel as much as if I were staying in their convent,” the saint wrote in a letter in 1900.
"It made sense"
“In Rome, there was no special place to pray to Charles de Foucauld, a saint very dear to Pope Francis. It made sense to do something here,” says Brother Renaud Escande, administrator of the Pius Establishments of France in Rome, who initiated the project.
With the blessing of the Holy See, the Dominican friar worked to bring a relic of the saint to the small church, which already boasts those of the Frenchman Pierre-Julien Eymard (1811-1868), a promoter of Eucharistic adoration. “We have obtained the last relic of Charles de Foucauld, a second class relic,” he explains.
It’s a piece of the shroud that wrapped Charles de Foucauld's body after his death, and in which he was buried near his hermitage in Tamanrasset, Algeria.
There’s also a piece of the chasuble with which he celebrated the Eucharist. The medallion containing the relic is only 2⅛” in diameter. To create a reliquary that shows its value, the Pious Institutions and the French Embassy to the Holy See launched an international competition last year.
An Algerian plastic artist and the French carpenter
Algerian artist Abdelkader Benchamma won the competition. Working with Nomade Architecture et Patrimoine, they came up with a “project inspired by the saint's spiritual life and his hermitage in the desert.” It's a wooden triptych with movable panels, that opens onto elements depicting the Hoggar, the territory at the heart of the Sahara. “Abstract flows draw strata of ochre and starry night in the manner of a mental landscape,” details the project description, which can be seen on the Nomade website.
To create the wooden structure, the artists naturally turned to a carpenter with a singular history with the saint ... For the moment, little information about this collaboration between Abdelkader Benchamma and Charle has reached the public, and their work is credited through the name of the Asselin company. But the inauguration of the reliquary on February 6 should give them a chance to tell the story of this new adventure.
