Love never fails

Charles de Foucauld was a French Catholic priest and hermit who lived among the Muslim Tuareg people in the Sahara in Algeria. He was shot dead at the age of 58 in an assassination attempt in 1916. His life and his extraordinary writings led to the founding of a number of religious communities inspired by his example, including the Little Brothers of Jesus.

Fr. Charles lived in radical simplicity and poverty, and sought to witness to Christ among his Muslim neighbors through friendship and service. He was adamant that loving others in Christ’s name is not a clever means to the end of achieving their conversion, but is rather the very end itself. I have come to believe this subtle point is monumental in its implications. Only loving others as its own end and not as a means to some additional end manifests Christ, whose love for us is unconditional.

This does not mean one hides faith when loving another, as people in a highly secularized and pluralistic society often imagine, but rather that loving God and one’s neighbor is the sole goal of all faith.

Such an evangelizing commitment to love avoids what a convert to Catholicism once said of her experience of her coworkers who belonged to a nondenominational church: “I always felt that they were super nice to me and wanted to be my friend so they could make me a Christian, and that they would stop hanging out with me if I didn’t. It felt kinda like Amway.”

It also avoids Christ’s own startling indictment of the Pharisees and scribes’ proselytizing hypocrisy:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

A proselyte is a convert, and passionate zeal for converts can mask all kinds of disordered loves. In fact, in our Catholic tradition ‘proselytizing’ has negative connotations of manipulative, dishonest or disingenuous methods of gaining converts.

A final point. There are as many ways to evangelize as there are Christians who evangelize. To reduce evangelization to a formulaic method that is mass produced and copied by all for effective results can undermine the integrity of each Christian life as a unique manifestation of the infinite richness of Christ. This, by the way, is the genius of Pope Francis’ teaching in Gaudete et exultate.

How we are each to witness to the Gospel in our own place is a call that must be daily discerned by each person. In this age of mass-produced programs and methods that contain “silver bullet” promises of one-size-fits-all effectiveness and success — ‘just add water’ and you will make converts, be healed, be happy, be holy — this point cannot be emphasized enough.

Fr. Charles’ way was itself unique to its time and uniquely suited to life lived among his Muslim neighbors. He said of his own way, “It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.”

As Pope Francis, who canonized Fr. Charles in 2022, said:

Saint Charles de Foucauld, a figure who is a prophecy for our time,
bore witness to the beauty of communicating the Gospel
through the apostolate of meekness:
considering himself a “universal brother” and welcoming everyone,
he shows us the evangelizing power of meekness, of tenderness.
Let us not forget that God’s style is summarized in three words:
closeness, compassion and tenderness.
God is always near, he is always compassionate, he is always tender.
And Christian witness must take this road:
of closeness, compassion and tenderness.
And this is how he was, meek and tender.
He wanted everyone he met to see, through his goodness,
the goodness of Jesus.
Indeed, he used to say he was a “servant to someone much better than I.”
Living Jesus’ goodness led him to forge fraternal bonds of friendship
with the poor, with the Tuareg, with those furthest from his mentality.
Gradually these bonds generated fraternity, inclusion, appreciation of the other’s culture.
Goodness is simple and asks us to be simple people,
who are not afraid to offer a smile.
And with his smile, with his simplicity,
Brother Charles bore witness to the Gospel.
Never by proselytism, never: by witness.
One does not evangelize by proselytism,
but by witness,
by attraction.