On Wednesday, Pope Francis urged future Vatican diplomats to emulate St. Charles de Foucauld, who was recently canonized.
The pope advised students at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy to look to the 19th-century French soldier, explorer, priest, and mystic as a model of holiness for diplomatic life.
He also suggested St. Peter Faber, a Jesuit priest from the 16th century, as a model for priests called to represent the Holy See around the world.
He made the suggestion during a visit to a Rome college that trains Catholic priests for the Vatican diplomatic service on June 8.
“In his address to students,” the Holy See press office said on June 9, “the pope stressed the importance of rootedness in a priestly spirituality nourished by prayer.”
He also emphasized “the importance of the missionary year he desired as an integral part of the path of preparation” for a diplomatic career.
Pope Francis requested that priests in formation for the Holy See’s diplomatic service spend a year in missionary work, the Vatican announced in February 2020.
He said the priests would be able to “share a period of journey together with their community, participating in their daily evangelizing activity” with the missionary churches.
In Algeria’s Sahara desert, Charles de Foucauld, also known as Brother Charles of Jesus, served among the Tuareg people. On Dec. 1, 1916, a gang of men assassinated him at his hermitage in the Sahara.
Benedict XVI declared him a blessed in 2005 and Pope Francis canonized him on May 15.
Days after the canonization, the pope disclosed that learning about the saint’s spirituality helped him during a period of crisis as a theology student.
“I would like to thank St. Charles de Foucauld, because his spirituality did me so much good when I was studying theology, a time of maturation and also of crisis,” the pope said on May 18.
He also paid tribute to him at the end of his 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti, in which he described the Frenchman as a “person of deep faith who, drawing upon his intense experience of God, made a journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all.”
He said that the saint “directed his ideal of total surrender to God towards an identification with the poor, abandoned in the depths of the African desert.”
“He conveyed his desire to feel like a brother to every human being in that situation, and he requested a buddy to ‘pray to God that I truly be the brother of all.’ He aspired to be ‘the global brother’ in the end. But it was only by connecting with the least that he was finally able to become the brother of all. The pope remarked, “May God inspire that dream in each of us.”
St. Peter Faber was born in 1506 and studied at the University of Paris, where he met St. Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius Loyola. The three men would later go on to found the Society of Jesus.
In 2013, Pope Francis declared Faber a saint through a process known as equipollent canonization.