"Converted to Christ who is truth and love, Augustine followed Him all his life and is a model for every human being in search of God". It was said by the Pope during today’s general audience, marking the end of the cycle of catecheses five about the figure of "one of the greatest converted men in Christian history". "Even today as in his time said the Pontiff about the topicality of Augustine’s journey , humankind needs to know and above all to live this fundamental reality: God is love, and meeting God is the only answer to the restlessness of the human heart. A heart which is inhabited by hope, which is perhaps still unknown and unconscious in many of our contemporaries, but which for us Christians already opens up to the future". "Largely" owing to saint Augustine’s thinking, revealed the Pope, were his two encyclicals: the first one, "Deus caritas est", given back "ideally to the Church and to the world" just "before the grave of this great lover of God" during his pilgrimage to Pavia; the second one, "Spe salvi", which speaks of hope, taking its cue from Augustine’s "meeting" with God. At the start of the catechesis, the Holy Father expressed his "personal devotion to a figure to whom I feel so closely bonded, for the part he played in my life as a theologian and pastor, and even before that, as a man and as a priest". (continued)
