Doctors of the Church: Saint Augustine

Doctors of the Church: Saint Augustine

Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Francis)

The following reflection was recorded as part of an EWTN Spanish television series "Doctores de la Iglesia (Doctors of the Church)".English translation by EWTN.

The conversion of Saint Augustine was the starting point of his holiness.
Augustine was he one who best experienced a change in the conduct of his life, that led him to become a new man, that is, he turned completely around.  Behind him were the problems of anxiety, of the search. He left behind his unbridled passions, his dissolute life. He writes, “I was desiring and awaiting my liberation.  However, I remained tied to the ground, not with external chains, but with the irons of my own will.” 

Then comes a moment when he meets God and says this very beautiful phrase:  “Lord, you created us for yourself and our hearts will be restless until they rest in you.”  That is Augustine:  the man of restless heart.  But Augustine doesn’t understand without his mother by his side.   Augustine was a libertine, a free thinker, a pagan.

His Mother, who was a Christian, used to cry.  She used to cry for his conversion.  And this was granted to her.  At the moment of death, she said to Augustine and his brother:  “I don’t have any more reason to remain here.” She then looked at Augustine and told him, “Only one thing remained for me:  to see you become a Christian and this God gave me in abundance.  It is done.  I have found what I was looking for with my tears.  From the tears of his mother, Augustine meets God.  And he begins to describe what a life of union with God is like.  God entered his heart and remained.

And He teaches us how to discover Him inside ourselves, even in the moments of greatest sin and dissapation.  He writes:  “You were with me but I was not with you. They kept me far apart from you, those things which would have no being were they not in you.  But you called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;… I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

How is your internal deafness?  He is calling you from within with this anxiety you have, just like Augustine.  You have the same restless heart until you find him. 
Pensando en San Agustín , este hombre que, de pagano, pasó a ser cristiano, de libertino a santo…..Yo te daría un consejo: Déjate buscar por Dios, por ese Dios que te habla en tu corazón.

Thinking about Saint Augustine, this man who, as a pagan, became a Christian, (going) from libertine to saint…. I will give you a piece of advice:  let yourself look for God, for this God who speaks to you in your heart.”

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