St. Augustine Prayer Card (PC-54)

PC-54 — St. Augustine Prayer Card

"Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" — the greatest sinner who became the greatest theologian

There is a reason St. Augustine's Confessions has never gone out of print in sixteen hundred years. It is the most honest book ever written — a brilliant man laying bare every failure, every deception, every restless pursuit of pleasure and prestige and philosophy, and tracing through it all the relentless, patient love of a God who pursued him far longer than he ran. No saint in the history of the Church has described the interior life of a person who does not yet believe in God with more piercing accuracy. And no saint has described the moment of conversion with more devastating beauty.

Born in 354 in Tagaste, North Africa — present-day Algeria — to a pagan father and a devoutly Catholic mother, St. Monica, Augustine was baptized neither at birth nor in childhood, a common practice of the time. He excelled at everything the Roman world valued: rhetoric, philosophy, social advancement. He took a concubine, fathered a son, spent nine years as a follower of the Manichaean sect, and moved from Carthage to Rome to Milan in pursuit of prestige and truth — finding neither. Meanwhile, his mother followed him, praying with a persistence that a bishop once told her could not possibly go unanswered: "It cannot be that the son of these tears should perish."

In Milan, Augustine encountered St. Ambrose, whose preaching began to work on his resistant intellect. The conversion came not dramatically but inexorably — until one afternoon in a garden in 386, hearing a child's voice chanting "Take up and read," he opened the letters of St. Paul and felt the last chains fall away. He was baptized by St. Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387. He was thirty-two years old. He would live another forty-three years — as monk, priest, and Bishop of Hippo — producing over five million words of theology, philosophy, Scripture commentary, and pastoral letters that would shape the entire intellectual tradition of Western Christianity.

He is perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. His two greatest works — the Confessions and The City of God — remain in continuous publication and continuous relevance. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1298 by Pope Boniface VIII and is known by the title Doctor of Grace. He is the patron saint of theologians, philosophers, and printers. His feast day is August 28th. And his most quoted line — "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" — remains the most precise description of the human condition ever written.

Perfect for: Theologians, philosophers, seekers returning to the faith, Augustinian religious communities, August 28th feast day, RCIA, men's retreats, and anyone whose heart is still searching.