“If you love God, draw to the love of God all those who are united to you, all those in your house” (Saint Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 33,2,6).
I send a fraternal and hopeful greeting to all the religious and lay people of the Augustinian Recollect Family on the feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, patron saint of our Province.
As in previous years, I ask that we join together in one heart and one soul to give thanks to the provident God for all the gifts we have received this year.
Among them, I would like to highlight the new vocations to the priestly and consecrated life for the Province, those who have wanted to be part of the Augustinian Recollect Secular Fraternity, the mothers who pray for their children and have wanted to join the Association of Christian Mothers of Saint Monica, and the young people who have joined the adventure of the Augustinian Recollect Youth process.
Zonal Assemblies and Provincial Chapter are approaching. The assemblies will be held in November in the United States, Spain, and England, and in January 2026 in Mexico-Costa Rica and Brazil. The Provincial Chapter will begin on Monday, May 18, 2026, in Marcilla (Navarra, Spain).
Let us ask God for his blessing and special graces so that those of us who will participate in these meetings may know how to dialogue with humility, truth, and parrhesia; that our listening may be captivated, empathetic, receptive, and committed; that our way of speaking may be serene, clear, vital, and courageous; that the agreements we reach may be the fruit of committed communal discernment and a realistic understanding of the challenges facing the Church and society today.
We are disciples of the Master Jesus Christ; intimacy with Him, sharing in His Eucharistic table, and witnessing to His love draw our minds and hearts to become His missionaries, witnesses of His Kingdom of love.
Pope Francis’s invitation to be pilgrims of hope continues to resonate strongly, and we begin the experience of a missionary year. This is what the Prior General and his team proposed to us with the motto taken from a sermon by Saint Augustine: “Proclaim Christ wherever you can” (Sermon 260E, 2).
We are an Order that was not born with missionary purposes, but mission became an essential feature of it a few years after its birth. Our mother and teacher, the Church, asked us to be missionaries in the Philippines, and we set out to carry out this charitable service with joy and readiness.
Since then, the mission has been part of our DNA. We are committed to the essence of the mission: to carry the message of the love of Jesus Christ, to ardently proclaim the kerygma that Jesus Christ became incarnate, died on the cross to save us, and rose again. Because the essence of the Church, her joy, her vocation, and her identity is to evangelize (Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi: The evangelization of the contemporary world, 14).
As a Province, we had the good fortune to celebrate the centenary of our mission in Shangqiu, China, in 2024, and we will celebrate the centenary in Lábrea, Brazil, in 2025. We have been sent to evangelize and carry out social promotion in the Churches of Brazil and China, and we have borne many fruits amidst so much joy and suffering.
Saint Nicholas of Tolentine developed a missionary spirit; this led him to win his brothers and sisters over to Christ with his life’s witness, his cordiality, and his charitable service to the needy.
The light of Saint Nicholas illuminates the life and mission of all the religious and lay people of the Augustinian Recollect Family, those who work in mission areas, and those of us who have a missionary spirit.
Over the next year, we will especially cultivate this missionary spirit and missionary heart. Strengthening the missionary spirit doesn’t mean losing strength in the other services we perform, because all of them are part of our history, journey, and commitment to the Church and society.
Therefore, alongside the missionary spirit, we continue to cultivate the spirit and heart of social assistance, of education in schools, of accompaniment in formation houses, of evangelization in parishes and spirituality centers…
May Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, a faithful witness who led his brothers to Jesus Christ, intercede for the religious and lay people who form the Augustinian-Recollect Family within the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine.
