Fresco of Saint Augustine in the Chapel at: Istituto Maria Immacolata, Montichiari, Italy

    

      saint Augustine was born at Tagaste, (North) Africa, on  November 13, 354. His mother Saint Monica was a devout Christian, but his father, Patricus was still a pagan. Through the admirable virtues of Saint Monica, which have made her the ideal of Christian mothers, her husband received the grace of baptism and of a holy death, about the year 371.

 

     Augustine was educated as a Christian, but had delayed his baptism. At one point in his childhood he became very ill and he asked for baptism, but once the danger had passed he deferred baptism yet again. Augustine was thus sent to Carthage to study and during this time gave himself up to pleasure and vice, eventually even having a child outside of marriage.

 

     In 373, Augustine and his friend Honoratus fell into the snares of the Manichæans. Once won over to this sect, Augustine devoted himself to it with all the ardor of his character; he read all its books, adopted and defended all its opinions. Monica deeply deplored Augustine’s heresy and would not have received him into her home or at her table but for the advice of a saintly bishop, who declared that “the son of so many tears could not perish.” It was not until Faustus of Mileve, the celebrated Manichæan bishop, at last came to Carthage; Augustine visited and questioned him, and discovered that he too could not answer his questions. The spell was broken, and, although Augustine did not immediately abandon the sect, his mind rejected Manichæan doctrines. The illusion had lasted nine years.

 

     In 383 Augustine visited Bishop Ambrose, the fascination of that saint’s kindness induced him to become a regular attendant when he would preach. He was converted and was received into the Catholic Church in 387 by Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. In 388 he returned to his home in Tagaste, where he began to live the life in common with some friends.

 

     In 390 he was ordained to the priesthood and moved to Hippo; there he established another community with several of his friends who had followed him from Tagaste. Five years later he was elected Bishop and made vicar to Valerius, Bishop of Hippo, whom he succeeded the following year.

 

 

    

 

 

     On becoming Bishop of Hippo “he wanted with him in his episcopal house a monastery of clerics,” and he desired that the clerics of his cathedral form a community based on the example of the first community in Jerusalem described in the Acts of the Apostles: “Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed were his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32).

 

     In 430 he was stricken with what he realized to be a fatal illness and after three months of admirable patience and fervent prayer, he died on 28 August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age.