On 21 September 1912, Father de Foucauld wrote to Madam de Bondy: «Pray also for all the Moslems of our north-west African empire now so vast. The present hour is extremely grave for their souls as it is for France. For the eighty years that Algiers has been ours, we have been so little occupied with saving the souls of the Moslems that one might say that we have not been occupied with it at all. Nor have we taken the trouble to manage them well or to civilise them. We have kept them in submission, nothing more. If the Christians of France fail to understand that it is their duty to evagelise their colonies, it is a fault for which they will have to render an account, and it will result in the loss of a vast number of souls who might have been saved.» Excerpted from the website of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 21st century.
(This was originally published in From the Housetops as a sidebar of an article called “Venerable Charles de Foucauld“)
