In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

my Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here,

that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence.

I ask you pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My mother immaculate, St. Joseph, my father, Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Augustine of Hippo is one of the greatest fathers of the Latin Church and of the church as a whole.

He lived from 354 to 430 after the birth of Christ.

And thanks to his confessions,

Augustine's life is well known.

In the words of a renowned scholar on the early church,

Henry Chadwick,

no figure of the ancient world is more accessible to us than Augustine. His sincerity about his difficulties, moral failures, and doubts

makes him attractive to us in our own cultural context of the 21st century, which in many aspects is so like Augustine's

times. His conversion and holy life after his conversion encourage us to follow him upstream

against the current of mainstream culture. Augustine spent most of his life in Northern Africa,

almost half of it as Bishop of Hipporegius in today's Algeria. He was the most prolific

early Christian theologian writing over 100 books, hundreds of letters, and preaching over 8,000 sermons.

Thus, he almost single-handedly transformed the Western Church.

Augustine's brilliant rhetoric, his elegant language, his eloquence, his captivating images, his penetrating

intelligence, the sheer mass of his literary production are like an avalanche that swept away

the evil of the past and left us with the good of the past, with a clean slate or a recasting of memory,

...