1. Charles Lavigerie previously served as Archbishop of Algiers and Bishop of Nancy.
17 Facts About Charles Lavigerie
1. 2.
Charles Lavigerie promoted Catholicism among the peoples of North Africa, as well as the Black natives further south.
3.
Charles Lavigerie was equally ardent to transform them into French subjects.
4.
Charles Lavigerie crusaded against the slave trade, and he founded the White Fathers, so named for their white cassocks and red fezzes.
5.
Charles Lavigerie sent his missionaries to the Sahara, Sudan, Tunisia, and Tripolitania.
6.
Charles Lavigerie's efforts were supported by the pope and the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
7.
Charles Lavigerie was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and, in October 1861, shortly after his return to Europe, was appointed French auditor at Rome.
8.
Charles Lavigerie declined the appointment of Archbishop of Lyons, requesting instead an appointment to the see of Algiers, just raised to an archbishopric.
9.
Charles Lavigerie landed in Africa on 11 May 1868, when the great famine was already making itself felt, and he began in November to collect the orphans into villages.
10.
Charles Lavigerie made it clear that he had come to serve the whole population of Algeria.
11.
Contact with the natives during the famine caused Charles Lavigerie to entertain exaggerated hopes for their general conversion, and his enthusiasm was such that he offered to resign his archbishopric in order to devote himself entirely to the missions.
12.
In 1870 at Vatican I, Charles Lavigerie warmly supported papal infallibility.
13.
On 27 March 1882, the dignity of cardinal was conferred upon Charles Lavigerie, given the titulus of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, but the great object of his ambition was to restore the see of St Cyprian; and in that he was successful, for by a bull of 10 November 1884 the metropolitan see of Carthage was re-erected, and Charles Lavigerie received the pallium on 25 January 1885.
14.
Charles Lavigerie sponsored the education of Adrien Atiman, a medical student who had been ransomed from slavery by the White Fathers, at the University of Malta.
15.
Charles Lavigerie hoped, by organizing a fraternity of armed laymen as pioneers, to restore fertility to the Sahara; but this community did not succeed, and was dissolved before his death.
16.
In 1890, Charles Lavigerie appeared in the new character of a politician and arranged with Pope Leo XIII to make an attempt to reconcile the church with the republic.
17.
Charles Lavigerie invited the officers of the Mediterranean squadron to lunch at Algiers, and, practically renouncing his monarchical sympathies, to which he clung as long as the comte de Chambord was alive, expressed his support of the republic, and emphasized it by having the Marseillaise played by a band of his Peres Blancs.