#augustinian saints

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Stephen of Bellesini

We Augustinians recognize in the person of Stephen Bellesini a brother who personifies what is best in the vocation we share with him: a firm dedication to religious life combined with passion for service to others and the ability to adjust to limitations, without capitulating in the face of challenges.

Stephen found an opportunity to live his life faithful to his ideals, and in fruitful benefit to others, in the circumstances that life unexpectedly presented to him. He did not hesitate to give up family, friends, reputation, position and even citizenship, to ‘meet his destiny’ with fellow religious in Rome.

Blessed Stephen Bellesini, O.S.A. models for friars, and for many other people, as well, what it means to live authentically and faithfully the life we have embraced.¹

Read More about Blessed Stephen Bellisini

O God, who made the priest Blessed Stephen admirable for educating youth and for promoting filial devotion to the Mother of God, grant that by imitating his zeal we may generously respond to the needs of the Church.

Father Michael Di Gregorio, O.S.A., Prior Provincial of the Augustinian Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova

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James of Viterbo

The salvation of anything consists in unity or union with that which is fitting and suitable to itself. But nothing is more suitable to the rational soul than the highest good, which is God; and therefore human salvation consists in union with him. This union takes place above all through love. Therefore, the end of sacred doctrine is primarily the love of God, and consequently the love of our neighbor also, since he is the image of God.

For love does not pass away but is made perfect, because the more perfect our knowledge is the more perfect our love will be, since knowledge is the source of love and the way by which it grows.

Friendship consists in the sharing of life, for nothing is more appropriate to friendship than living and talking together.¹

James was born around the year of 1255 in Viterbo. Giles of Rome, a respected Augustinian theologian, would be his teacher in Paris, where James would also later go on to teach. He would be ordained bishop of Benevento in 1302 and soon be instated in Naples. The influence and love of Augustine would be noted in his writings. He died in Naples in the early 1300s.²

Read More about Blessed James of Viterbo.

Pʀᴀʏᴇʀ God our Father, you have enriched the Church through the teaching and example of Blessed James of Viterbo. His gifts of wisdom, humility, and generous service call us to a more authentic and faithful following of your Son, who became for our sake the servant of all. Fill us with the spirit of selflessness, that like Blessed James we too may spend our lives in loving service of your Church and all its members. Through Christ our Lord. Blessed James, Pray for us!

1. From the writings of Blessed James of Viterbo 2. From Saint Augustine Parish, Philadelphia, PA. 

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Saint Clare of Montefalco

Born in 1268, Clare was only six years old when she entered a kind of hermitage which her father had arranged for his older daughter, Joan. In 1290 Joan asked the bishop of Spoleto to declare the place a monastery, and the bishop gave her the Rule of Augustine.

After the death of her sister Joan, Clare was chosen abbess of the monastery. Her spirituality is a striking example of a synthesis of Augustinian and Franciscan spiritual life. Its main characteristic is the unitive contemplation of the sufferings of Jesus. Her maxim was: “I don’t need an external cross for I bear the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ in my heart.” Christian life does not consist of external signs, but in the conformity of our heart, intellect, and will to Christ. Although she was a mystic, she opposed a quietist sect called “The followers of the free spirit.” On her deathbed in 1308, the last exhortation to her sisters was: “Be humble patient, and united in love. Behave in such a way that God may be honored in you, and that the work he has wrought in you may not be lost.”

Read More about Saint Clare of Montefalco

Prayer

Saint Clare, Sister and Mother, you accompany us along the path of God in the search of Beauty and Love, that is always possible when the heart is the center of interiority.

Teach us to make our heart the dwelling place of the Lord, where He can rest his Cross, so that our life could be a gift for all and for the Church, that you have loved and served in the prayer that transforms into the image of Jesus Christ and intercede for us to the Father.

We will announce with you early in the morning with fear and great joy How Beautiful is the life of heaven! How Beautiful what the Lord is giving us! How Beautiful to praise the Lord! Amen.

Written by Fr Tarcisius van Bavel, OSA, from Augustine, and originally published by Editions du Signe, Torino, Italy, in 1996.

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The Duties of a Bishop

Read Augustine’s Return to Africa, the previous post in the series

Primacy of the Bible

Bishop Augustine led a very busy life, his entire time being taken up with preaching, teaching, catechetical instruction, synods, public debates, and journeying all over North Africa. The emperor Constantine had also put the office of a local judge under the care of the bishops. Every morning he had to listen to lawsuits: questions of inheritance, of guardianship, of ownership, of demarcation, and so on, a burden that he did not like at all. Moreoever, as a man of study and contemplation, he was a very productive writer. His works cover some 12,000 pages in modern printing: 113 books, 247 letters, and more than 500 sermons have been preserved. How could he manage so many distinct activities? He himself more or less gives the answer when he declares that his writing was mostly done at night. Then he dictated his writings to shorthand writers.

Possidius, his friend and biographer, tells us that, after he had disposed of the care of temporal and irksome affairs, he turned his mind to meditation on the divine scriptures. The significance of the Bible in Augustine’s work cannot be stressed often enough. He knew the Bible by heart; it was for him the height of all truth, the source of all teaching, and the center of all cultural and spiritual life. His theology is in the full sense of the word a biblical one. His desire was that through his voice the word of God should be heard. Another characteristic of his works is that most of what he wrote was at the request of others; only a very few books were not provoked by external circumstances. We will present here only a rough classification of his writings.

Anti-Manichean writings

Augustine saw it as his first duty to devote himself to the conversion of his former friends, the Manichees. What he had previously thought to be the truth, he now saw as an error. He had been responsible for the adherence to the Manichean doctrine.

Anti-Donatist works

In the following period of his life he was forced to concern himself with a very sad situation, that of a separation within the North African Church. As soon as he was ordained a priest, he had to face the disunity among Christians, caused by the schism of Donatism. Every town had a Donatist and a Catholic church, every diocese a Donatist and a Catholic bishop, all in all over three hundred bishops on each side. The assertion that all should be one in Christ was fictitious. The Donatists pretended to be the only pure Church; they considered the Catholics as betrayers of the purity of Christian law. To understand how painful this split was, it must be remembered that the Donatists used the same holy scriptures, professed the same faith, possessed the same sacraments, and celebrated the same liturgy as did the Catholics. Hatred alone divided the Christians of Africa, and the conflict sometimes deteriorated into a civil war. With immense energy Augustine dedicated himself to restoring peace and unity, but he never completely succeeded in bringing an end to the Donatist schism - this in spite of the fact that the Conference at Carthage in 411, under the chairmanship of the very conscientious imperial delegate, Marcellinus, had decided against the Donatists. Two years later Marcellinus himself was executed at Carthage. This murder was a heavy blow for Augustine, and it was one of the reasons why he lost his enthusiasm for the alliance between the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.

Ant-Pelagian writings

In 411, after the condemnation of Donatism, Augustine must have hoped for some peace, but instead he became involved in another controversy, this time with Pelagianism. Pelagius was a servant of God, the inspirer of a more radical and ascetical Christian life, and held in high esteem by the Roman aristocrats. He insisted strongly on free will and on the efforts human beings had to make in order to reach perfection. Since perfection lies in the power of the human person, it is, according to him, something obligatory. No wonder that he was scandalized by a sentence in Augustine’s Confessions, namely: “Command what you will, give what you command.” For him this was cowardice and laxity. Pelagius concept of Christian perfection contrasted to a certain degree with Augustine's theology and experience as a convert. Pelagius did not deny the role of God’s grace, but saw it rather as a divine help coming from outside. On the other hand, like Paul, Augustine was convinced that the human will had to be strengthened from within by God’s grace: all the good things we do are gifts of divine grace. It seemed to him that the Pelagian claim to be able to achieve a Church without spot or blemish continued the Donatist presumption of a pure Church. In Augustine’s eyes, the human situation is much more complex. Human freedom is not a static quality. Our freedom which has to become more and more free. Augustine also believed in the doctrine of original sin, including the existence of a collective guilt, with humankind as a whole responsible for the evil in the world. Certainly one need not agree with Augustine in every detail of his view on original sin (as, for example, his conviction that unbaptized infants will be excluded from the highest degree of eternal bliss). His last work, left unfinished at his death, was against the Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum, the son of an Italian bishop friend. Julian was the most able adversary Augustine ever met. Augustine’s controversy with the much younger Julian was the most dramatic of his life, in which positions on both sides became more and more inflexible.

Go back to the Young Augustine, the first post in the series.

How to Read & Study Augustine by Fr Mark

The Augustine Digital Library by Fr Mark

Read a brief History of the Augustinian Order, also by Fr van Bavel, OSA

Praying with Saint Augustine by Fr Gervase Corcoran, OSA

Written by Fr Tarcisius van Bavel, OSA, from Augustine, and originally published by Editions du Signe, Torino, Italy, in 1996.

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Augustine's Conversion

Read the Evolution of the young Augusitne, the previous post in this series.

Separation from his mistress

Monica had seen to it that her newborn baby, Augustine, was signed with the sign of the cross and received salt, which meant that he was received as a catechumen in the Catholic Church. The intense significant and responsibility attached to baptism led many Christian parents to postpone baptism; this was the reason why many people were baptized only on their deathbeds. Augustine’s decision to receive baptism had been blocked for a long time by two obstacles, one of a moral and the other of an intellectual nature. It was now a question of removing these obstacles.

The relationship with his mistress came to an end under pressure from Monica, who strove for a “first class” marriage for her son. She found him a new bride, only ten years old and almost two years under age for marriage. Augustine had loved his mistress sincerely and the separation from her affected him deeply. “My heart which was deeply attached to her was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood. She had returned to Africa vowing that she would never go with another man.” He was unhappy and felt incapable of following the example of his wife; therefore he procured another mistress. It gave him no relief, as he himself states: “But my wound, inflicted by the earlier parting, was not healed. After inflammation and sharp pain, it festered. The pain made me as it were frigid and desperate.” For Augustine conversion included more than an honorable marriage; it also implied conversion to the monastic ideal of asceticism and chastity.

From reason to faith

His intellectual difficulties were more complicated. For a long time he considered the Catholic faith good for simple souls like that of monica. He had put all his confidence in the power of reason, and desired comprehension and understanding by his own resources alone. He was a rationalist in the fullest sense of the word. The Manichees had promised him insight into the mysteries of life, without the need for faith. They mocked at mere belief and promised knowledge. However, they ordered belief in many fabulous and absurd myths: “I was ordered to believe Mani.” He was disappointed and his rationalism was undermined. At that moment, he gave his preference to the Catholic faith, for he thought it more modest to be told by the Church to believe what could not be demonstrated. Thus he discovered the important role played by belief in daily life: how many things he believed which he had not seen, events which occurred when he was not present, such as incidents in the history of nations, facts concerning places and cities which he had never seen, things accepted on the words of friends, from physicians, from other people. And he drew the conclusion, unless we believed what we were told, we would do nothing at all in this life. After he had lost faith in Manicheism, Augustine went through a short crisis of skepticism, during which he despaired of the possibility of finding the truth, is not everything a matter of doubt? Does an understanding of the truth not lie beyond human capacity? This crisis also prepared the ground for the coming conversion.

The influence of Ambrose

Many people played a part in Augustine’s conversion, especially Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. His influence was not through personal contact, but rather through his sermons, which allowed Augustine to discover how different Christian faith was from what he had supposed. Ambrose’s sermons taught Augustine how to interpret the biblical texts, and introduced him to some totally new ideas: “I noticed, repeatedly, in the sermons of our bishop… that when God or the soul, which is the one thing in the world nearest to God, is thought of, our thoughts should not dwell on anything corporeal whatsoever.” The reading of books of Platonic philosophers gave him a deeper insight into the world of the spirit, and their writings also offered him an answer to the burning problem of evil. Friends told him exemplary stories of famous persons who had converted to a Christian lifestyle.

Take and read

Thus Augustine came to his well-known personal crisis in the garden of his house in Milan. There he heard a voice from a nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl, repeating over and over again “Take and read, take and read.” He interpreted these words as a divine command, opened the Bible, and read the first passage on which his eyes lit: Not in riots and drunken parties, not in debauchery and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts (Rom 13:13-14). All the shadows of doubt were now dispelled. It was not merely accidental that a text of the great convert, the apostle Paul, was at the heart of Augustine’s conversion. The influence of Paul on Augustine continued throughout his whole life. In many respects his later theology and spirituality showed similarity to Pauline ideas, such as the relation between law and grace, the consequences of original sin, the parallelism between Adam and Christ, and the theme of the body of Christ.

After the holidays in 386, Augustine resigned his professorship, and retired to the country, to Cassiciacum, in order to study, to write, and to prepare for baptism. At the Easter Vigil of the year 387, he was baptized by Ambrose, together with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Augustine, as he himself states, had made the leap: “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.

Read Augustine’s Return to Africa, the next post in the series

Written by Fr Tarcisius van Bavel, OSA, from Augustine, and originally published by Editions du Signe, Torino, Italy, in 1996.

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Blessed Mariano de la Mata Aparicio, O.S.A.

Augustinian Priest and Missionary

On this day twelve years ago, November 6, in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI Beatified Mariano de la Mata. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins presided over the celebration in São Paulo, Brasil that day. As I was in my first years of Augustinian Life, this did impact me.

Mariano de la Mata Aparicio was born on 31 December 1905 at Puebla de Valdavia, Spain, and was raised in a profoundly Christian family.

Following the example of his other three brothers, he entered the Order of St Augustine in 1921 and took the habit from the hands of a compatriot, Fr Anselm Polanco, the future Bishop of Teruel who was beatified in 1995.

In 1930, after completing his studies in Valladolid and Santa Maria de la Vid (Burgos), Mariano was ordained a priest.

After less than two years of priestly service in his native Spain, Fr de la Mata Aparicio was destined for missionary work in Brazil. He arrived there in 1931, and there he remained for more than 50 years until his holy death in 1983.

Read More at the Vatican

Image: Commemorative Medal from the Beatification in 2006. Although I was not in attendance, I received this gift from the Prior General at that time.

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Saint Rita of Cascia

We do not possess much historically reliable information about Rita. The earliest information stems from the inscription on the coffin that contained her body. Born in the last decades of the fourteenth century, she married young - according to oral tradition - and had two children. She was widowed around the age of twenty-five when her husband was murdered. This killing was probably in connectoin with the fighting between the towns and the castles, in other words between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. After the death of her husband, she entered into the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Cascia. During the last years of her life she shared in the sufferings of Christ’s passion through a thorn wound that the Lord granted her. Because she was against all the violence caused by the social conflicts in the region of Cascia, she was considered a peacemaker and was given the title “advocate of the impossible.” She died in 1457 and was canonized by Leo XIII in 1900.

Read More about Saint Rita of Cascia.

Prayer

O glorious Saint Rita, during your entire life on earth you found your happiness by following the will of our heavenly Father. Help me this day to trust God’s designs for me and to give myself to him as you did, without fear, and without counting the cost. May be generous in serving others, patient in difficulty, and forgiving toward those who injure me. Be with me so that I may accept the mystery of the cross of Jesus and may come to experience its power to heal and save.

Written by Fr Tarcisius van Bavel, OSA, from Augustine, and originally published by Editions du Signe, Torino, Italy, in 1996.

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Saint John Sahagún

John was born about 1430, and studied at the Benedictine Abbey of Sahagún in Leon province. He assisted the bishop of Burgos, Alonso of Cartagena about 1454. When Bishop Alonso died in 1456, John renounced his chaplaincy and the canonry he had in Burgos, and was transferred to Salamanca. From 1457 till 1461 he studied canon law and theology there. In 1460 he was named preacher of the city, a priest in the church of Saint Stephen, and a member of the university collge of Saint Bartholomew. But in 1463 he gave up these offices and benefices, and took the Augustinian habit. He was twice prior of the community of Salamanca, the principal house of his observant congregation, reformed by John of Alarcon in 1438. He died there in 1479. His biographer was convinced that he was murdered by one of the men whose vices he had denounced, for John, the apostle of Salamanca, had much boldness in his preaching, always saying the truth. He was canonized in 1690.

Read more about Saint John Sahagún

Prayer

O God, from whom faith draws perseverance and weakness strength, grant, through the example and prayers of the St John Sahagún, that we may share in the Passion and Resurrection of your Only Begotten Son, so that with the Saints we may attain perfect joy in your presence. Through Christ our Lord.

Saint John Sahagún, Pray for us!

Written by Fr Tarcisius van Bavel, OSA, from Augustine, and originally published by Editions du Signe, Torino, Italy, in 1996.