The election of the first-ever pope to hail from the Order of Saint Augustine appears to have renewed interest in the order, with a vocations director reporting receiving well over 400 inquiries from young men in the US.
The Order of Saint Augustine was officially formed in 1244, after hermits living in Tuscany petitioned the pope to be united as one group.
But no member of the order had been elected to the papacy for eight centuries until the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost, a Chicago native who was the order’s prior general between 2001 and 2013 and who took on the papal name of Leo XIV.
In an article on the latest edition of The Augustinian, a magazine produced by the Augustinian Province of St Thomas of Villanova – one of the order’s three North American provinces, covering the eastern coast of the United States – the province’s director of vocations Fr Jeremy Hiers OSA recalled that as the order celebrate the election of its first-ever pope, he received various messages from fellow friars suggesting that he was about to become very busy.
These messages proved prescient, he observed, with hundreds of inquiries arriving so far.
The Augustinian Order has a long history in Malta, believed to have arrived by the end of the 14th century: its presence is confirmed in 1413. The Maltese Augustinians became a separate province of the order in 1817.
The order’s presence has ensured that Pope Leo XIV has already visited Malta on a number of occasions, primarily during his term as prior general but also as recently in 2023.
Anyone wishing to contact the vocations director of the Maltese Augustinian Province may do so through a form on their website.
Source: Newsbook.com.mt
Article written by John Paul Cordina
