Fr John Iacono Jubilee Mass (27/08/2026)

Not long ago, they were saying in the church that we are all Jesuits now.

Now we are all Augustinians.

But it's not just Pope Leo the Augustinian who richly seasons his speeches and documents with quotes from Saint Augustine.

All the recent popes have in fact demonstrated a great affection for the Doctor of Grace.

But Saint Augustine is not a universal fan favourite.

Some blame him for original sin, which I would have thought was Adam and Eve and Satan's fault.

Some say he's the main source of Catholic guilt.

Some feminists have labelled him sexist.

Some Easterners say he took Western theology down the wrong track.

And still others have other complaints.

Augustine is, for instance, commonly charged with being behind a pessimistic strand in Catholic anthropology, politics and sexual ethics.

Still affected by the Manichean dualism of his early days and humiliated by his own moral failures, so the story goes.

He took evil too seriously.

Ironically, he's also accused of not taking evil seriously enough.

Because it was Augustine who clarified for the all of future Christian philosophy that evil is not a positive reality, but rather a privation.

something missing or that has gone wrong or is being misused in an otherwise good reality.

Goody or baddy, what's indisputable is Augustine's output.

His corpus is greater in volume than any other Christian writer.

coming in at some five million words.

And that's just the works that survive to today.

If someone tells you, even Father John, that they've read all of Saint Augustine, they're probably telling a porky.

However it's not just the volume that marks out Augustine as an exemplar of faith and reason.

Consider the range of subjects on which he wrote.

On God, Trinity, Christ and the Incarnation.

On the church and the sacraments.