Augustine of Hippo is our founder and the father of an extensive Religious Family that follows his Rule, his teachings and his way of life. In these pages we approach his biography, his sensitivity, his way of life and his proposals to men and women of all times.
It was an upside-down whirlpool, opening up and widening its circle. The hunger for recollection also enters the monasteries of nuns and from the beginning of the 17th century, bonfires of love for God are lit that warm and illuminate all of Spain. In 1604, as if by affinity, the Harvest also sprouted in Colombia. Two years later, in 1606, the spiritual pressure of the new movement shot him to the other part of the world, to the Philippines. Almost from the beginning this nascent battalion of my children advances at the same pace, firm and long, in all the bodies that will compose it later: the Augustinian Recollects -Castilian, Aragonese, Andalusian, Colombian and Filipino- and the Augustinian Recollect nuns.
The history of my Recollection during the 17th century should be reviewed very slowly, savoring it: it is a golden age. Life in the convents, which rivaled each other in complete dedication to God; the drafting of laws and the compilation of history itself, brief but already full of glories; total dedication to the service of the Church in the toughest missions; the maximum testimony of love that so many martyrs gave; Blessed Francisco de Jesús, Vicente de San Antonio, Martín de San Nicolás and Melchor de San Augustine, captains of hundreds of martyrs in Japan -the first, my spoiled girl: Magdalena de Nagasaki, young, beautiful and an altar saint-. It was the love of God, burning brightly in the hearts of my children. When have they been more like me? In what better way can the shield be made true, mine and theirs, with a burning heart pierced by the two arrows of love for God and for our brothers?
NEXT PAGE: b. The autumn of the eighteenth century
TABLE OF CONTENT: SAINT AUGUSTINE
- A. Biography of Augustine of Hippo
- B. Augustinian monasticism
- C. The tree that Augustine planted
