The History of the Order of St. Augustine - Grounded in Faith, Rooted in Service

Augustinians are the spiritual descendants of Saint Augustine, who is generally regarded as the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity and Western intellectual thought.

Augustine, named Aurelius Augustinus, was born in 354 A.D. of middle-class parents in the North African town of Thagaste. A brilliant and passionate scholar, he taught rhetoric in Carthage and later in Rome and Milan until his early 30's.  As he acknowledged with extreme candor in his Confessions, he developed an obsessive taste for pleasures of the flesh. A dramatic conversion to Christianity at the age of 32 set his life on a new course. He returned to North Africa and was soon ordained bishop of Hippo, where he was to spend the remaining 44 years of his life.

The scope of Augustine's intellectual and apostolic achievement is staggering. He wrote 113 books, among them two classics of world literature: The Confessions and The City of God. Over 800 of his sermons have been preserved. As priest and bishop, he traveled thousands of miles in service of the Church and fought tirelessly against the people who were dividing Catholics to the point of physical violence. Even in the midst of these demanding activities, Augustine's life had a very different side: He was, at heart, a monk.  After his conversion, Augustine had established a monastic community for himself and his friends in his parents' home in Thagaste, and there he had devoted a joyful three years to study, dialogue, and prayer. It is at this time that Augustine wrote his famous Rule for the monks who lived with him. Out of this tradition stems the emphasis on fraternal life in community on the part of the Augustinians of the thirteenth century and the Augustinians today.

When he became a bishop, he was determined not to abandon a way of life that he had found so fulfilling. He set up a monastery for priests in his bishop's residence and lived the Rule he wrote as a guide for living in a religious community. Augustine's monastery took monasticism in a new direction. Monks had pastoral duties, and they could not abandon those duties for a life of contemplation. But Augustine had come to believe that a monk could, and should, lead both a contemplative life and a life of action, as he expressed it in his work The City of God. A monk's first responsibility, he felt, was serving the Church--but study and contemplation would make that service all the more meaningful.

Since its beginnings in the thirteenth century, the Augustinian Order has been characterized by a style of life that is, like Augustine's, both active and contemplative. 

For Augustinians, perhaps our most distinctive feature and challenge is to live community life as Augustine envisioned it.

Augustinians came to America in 1796 and opened this the first Augustinian Parish in the United States. The parish of St. Augustine has been served by the Augustinians from day one.