Rimini – At the Rimini Meeting, the major annual cultural and ecclesial gathering held in the city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, a session devoted to St Augustine brought together scholar Catherine Conybeare, Prior General of the Augustinians, Fr Joseph L. Farrell, and Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers. Entitled “In Augustine’s Footsteps: Truth, restlessness and desire,” the event was held on 21 August.
Just a few months after Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic journey to Algeria, the reflection took on particular significance. The Pope, who describes himself as a “son of St Augustine,” visited Annaba, ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as bishop and died in 430. In the Basilica of St Augustine, he celebrated Mass, highlighting the significance of the pilgrimage to the roots of his spiritual family and to the service of peace and reconciliation, with particular emphasis on the witness of small Christian communities.
“I can say I am his nephew”
Cardinal Vesco first outlined his spiritual connection with the Bishop of Hippo. A Dominican, he recalled that St Dominic was a canon who followed the Rule of St Augustine, which later also became the rule of the Order of Preachers. “If the Holy Father has called himself a ‘son of Augustine,’ I can say that I am his nephew,” he remarked with a smile.
Without presenting himself as an Augustine expert, the Archbishop of Algiers explained how deeply the saint’s figure has affected him since his arrival in Algeria almost 25 years ago. Walking among the ruins of Hippo, he said, makes Augustine more familiar and removes the centuries that separate us from him. From this closeness comes the conviction that Augustine is truly “a man of our time.”
The first aspect in which Cardinal Vesco recognized himself was the young Augustine portrayed in the Confessions: “A brilliant young man seeking social success, simply seeking success,” but one who “sees all his dreams fading away, losing their meaning, becoming useless because, deep down, his thirst was for something else” and “his search was a thirst for truth.”
Indeed, when he felt called to something else, Jean-Paul Vesco was himself a successful lawyer. “The young lawyer I once was,” Vesco recalled, “also seeking ideals and success, likewise came to know the vanity of his pursuit of professional and social achievement. He can easily recognize himself in the young Augustine, whom no human success could satisfy any longer.”
Augustine eventually discovers that this truth is a person, Christ, encountered through a personal relationship. Vesco recalled the famous passage from the Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you,” together with Augustine’s admission that he sought God outside himself, while God was already within him.
Former lawyer Jean-Paul Vesco said he recognized himself in this journey. Young people today, he noted, are likewise searching for meaning, truth and vocation, particularly in a world undergoing profound transformations. For this reason, Augustine, despite belonging to a distant age, continues to speak to the men and women of today.
Theologian and pastor
The second aspect highlighted by the Cardinal was Augustine the pastor. A great theologian, but at the same time a bishop fully immersed in the concrete life of his Church, Augustine succeeded in bringing together two dimensions that are difficult to reconcile: theological reflection, which requires study and a certain distance, and pastoral action, which exposes one every day to people’s questions, wounds and needs.
Augustine’s thought, Vesco recalled, was also shaped by his controversies with the major heresies of his time. Yet his reflections on grace, forgiveness and free will were never abstract exercises: they arose from responses to concrete human and ecclesial situations.
In this sense, the Cardinal suggested that Augustine could be regarded as one of the fathers of pastoral theology. His numerous missions, journeys and interventions prompted by the “ecclesiasticae necessitates” show a bishop constantly called away from his own quiet surroundings. Citing studies documenting Augustine’s frequent absences from the small Diocese of Hippo, Vesco joked: “This consoles me a little: too often I am an ‘airport bishop.’”
Augustine’s memory in Algeria
The Cardinal then turned to the elderly Augustine, ill and nearing the end of his life, as Hippo was about to fall into the hands of the Vandals. Walking among the ruins of the so-called “Basilica of Peace,” where the saint may have celebrated the Eucharist and taught, Vesco invited the audience to imagine the elderly bishop confronted with the disappearance of his own world and of an entire civilization.
“What must he have thought at that moment, faced with what seemed to be the annihilation of his entire life?” Vesco asked. “Fifteen centuries later,” he continued, “how beautiful it is to see that his thought continues to nourish theology and generations upon generations of men and women! He could never have imagined that even a Pope would come to pay tribute to him precisely in that basilica!”
This enduring legacy, the Archbishop of Algiers observed, reveals Augustine’s universality: a man deeply rooted in his land, culture and time, yet capable of transcending the boundaries of eras and identities.
This universality is particularly evident in Algeria. Vesco recalled the first International Colloquium on St Augustine, held in Annaba in 2001 under the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika. For many Algerians, Augustine, although a Christian, remains a source of national pride and part of the country’s cultural heritage.
The election of Leo XIV, who presented himself as a “son of St Augustine,” likewise generated an immediate sense of closeness and familiarity in Algeria. “When Pope Leo, shortly after his election, declared himself a ‘son of St Augustine,’ the response in Algeria was immediate,” the Cardinal recalled. “The word quickly spread that the new Pope had family origins in Algeria, perhaps even relatives in Annaba! This sense of family belonging, beyond religious affiliation, says a great deal. Pope Leo was awaited and welcomed in Algeria as a brother, as one of their own.”
“We do not own Augustine”
For Cardinal Vesco, recognizing Augustine’s universality means not “confining” him to his place within Christian thought, while acknowledging that his theological reflection cannot be separated from faith in Christ.
Several Algerian Muslim authors have studied and written about the Bishop of Hippo. According to the archbishop, this reception from a different perspective is a healthy exercise. “We do not own Augustine or his thought,” he said.
The saint’s universality, therefore, does not arise from an abstract or “chemically pure” form of thought, detached from the concreteness of history. On the contrary, it springs from a fully embodied existence, lived in a land and an era marked by profound political, cultural and religious changes.
“Today, more than yesterday,” Vesco concluded, “we need to be able to recognize one another as brothers despite differences of faith and religion.” Augustine “is recognized as a believer worthy of trust, even by those who cannot share his faith. This is why Augustine is fully a man of our time.”
For Vesco, this is where Augustine’s relevance lies today. In a world marked by religious and cultural differences, the saint of Hippo invites believers to remain rooted in their faith without turning it into a possession or closure. The task is to be authentic believers, “nourished by a religious tradition that shapes us, but recognized as men and women worthy of trust even by those who do not share our faith.”
“Citizens of the city of humanity and, at the same time, citizens of the city of God.”
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