These days, the Christian people are celebrating the liturgical feast of Saint Augustine, from whom the Church has received so much. Within this same experience of the Church, and therefore in our journey of following Christ, we as Augustinian brothers have a particular calling to continuously deepen this heritage, to live it, and to pass it on to others. As I have had the opportunity to share with you on other occasions, this is a calling and a responsibility placed before us with even greater urgency through the figure of our brother Pope Leo XIV, and through the growing interest in the figure of Saint Augustine that, I feel, has increased within the Church in recent months.
The celebration of the feast of Saint Augustine invites us to pause and reflect on what this saint means for us, yet it cannot fail to remind us first and foremost of our particular calling — a calling which, before being Augustinian, comes from God himself. Our journey of renewal must be a constant desire to seek that God who has called us to follow him, as Pope Leo XIV reminded us in his Homily at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls on May 20th: “How could we choose if we had not first been chosen? We cannot love if someone had not first loved us” (Saint Augustine, Sermon 34, 2).
At the root of every vocation, God is present — in his mercy and goodness, as generous as that of a mother (cf. Is 66:11–13), who nourishes her child with her very own body until the infant is able to eat by himself (cf. Saint Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 130, 9).
The motto of Pope Leo XIV, “In Illo uno unum” (“In Him who is One, we are One”), taken from Saint Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 127, 3, emphasizes this reality of our unity in Jesus Christ, from whom we then draw the strength to live and share our lives together. It is only in Him that we can truly be one, and like Saint Augustine, we too can become builders of bridges.
Building bridges is certainly necessary, yet it also brings challenges. To achieve this, we need our prayer and the efforts of each one of us, so that we may “lessen divisions – a cross which we carry together.”
In this journey of ours, if there is something that should truly fill us with hope, it is the fact that, as Saint Augustine also teaches us, the grace of God is the greatest gift we can ever receive. It is precisely strengthened by this grace that we can continue walking with courage.
Fr Leslie Gatt osa
Prior Provincial