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.

Only that again, as always, the decay began. Not only in the Augustinian Recollection. It was general. The civil and ecclesiastical universe, philosophy and theology, religious and secular… enter into a crisis: the crisis of a world that is being questioned and will come to falter, the crisis that occurs when a new historical period is dawning, a new society.

The cloisters, which housed ardent Christian spirits, are, from now on, settings where an observant but routine life drags on. The interior vigor that gives meaning and content to conventual life is lacking. The mystics and saints of the earlier period are no longer so easily found.

And what is lost in longing for God is filled with worldly aspirations. The thirst for titles and prebends returns as an escape route from monastic rigor; what is proper is vigorously claimed against what is community, the rights acquired by science, concession or seniority; regionalisms arise and the broad horizons of the spirit are lost sight of.

It is true that not everything is negative: not everything is reduced to routine, the desire for privileges and a relaxed life. The mission field increases during the eighteenth century and the harvest is rich in all orders, spiritual, social and cultural. And there was no lack, far from it, of friars who gave themselves to the priestly ministry from the convents and dedicatedly nurtured popular piety with brotherhoods, missions in towns and cities… But as a whole, the blood pressure of the Order had dropped, its pulse it was weaker. And her spiritual anemia exposed her to serious dangers, in case the environmental circumstances were not very favorable or forced her to react by force.

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TABLE OF CONTENT: SAINT AUGUSTINE