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August 28, 2026Dear Friends in Christ,
Happy feast day! Today we rejoice in the great gift of such an eminent saint as our patron, St. Augustine. This Doctor of the Church is the patron not only of the Diocese of Tucson but also of our beautiful cathedral dedicated to his name. The Church has always leaned on the great saints for spiritual support—our faithful brothers and sisters down the centuries who, through lives of sanctity and faithfulness, have modeled for the world the Christian life.
When I was named the eighth bishop of the Diocese of Tucson and began to learn about the rich history of this local Church, I was overjoyed to know that St. Augustine would be my new patron. In so many ways, he offers an example of the Christian journey that reaches up into the heights of theology and philosophy while remaining ever grounded in the reality of the human experience—precisely what you and I are called to by our very baptism.
Among the many gifts St. Augustine has given to our Catholic faith, he stands with St. Thomas Aquinas as one of the most important theologians in two thousand years of Catholicism. He can also be considered the creator of the literary genre of autobiography through his foundational work, The Confessions. Yet, by virtue of his profound personal conversion, from a total non-believer in God to becoming a bishop and successor of the Apostles, St. Augustine is most famous for one of the opening lines of The Confessions: “Lord, you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
With all that St. Augustine wrote about God; this one line may be the most accurate portrayal of the human experience. There is a classic axiom in theology, rendered in Latin as Capax Dei, meaning capacity for God. The human person is the only creature in the history of the cosmos with Capax Dei, the capacity to know and love God. St. Augustine’s famous statement—“Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”—rings as true today as it did for him 1,800 years ago. By his own admission, a major component of his Confessions was his experience with the tug of war in which the soul engages on the journey to sanctity and faithfulness. As people created with Capax Dei, we are hardwired for relationship with God, and along the way to that nearness, experienced most profoundly in the reception of the Eucharist, we are beset by decisions about whether to find our joy in the things of this world or in God. I have asked in some of my recent homilies the question, “To whom do you belong, God or the world?” St. Augustine spent his whole life answering that question by an honest and sometimes difficult examination of conscience. You and I are no different. This is why he is such a powerful patron and intercessor for our diocese. He did what you and I strive to do each day—to live in the world but never to be of the world.
In the end, St. Augustine, by God’s grace and the intercession of his mother, St. Monica, was able finally and definitively to give himself to God. It is important to note that his words about being restless until resting in God speak of our heart rather than our hearts. Our heart is restless until it rests in God. This means that we are forever joined with St. Augustine and all the saints of our Church, those named officially and those unnamed members of the Communion of Saints, in bringing together our intellect and our will, our head and our heart, our thoughts and the movement of our souls, to will the one thing necessary in our lives: God.
If you have some spare time, I encourage you to learn more about St. Augustine and to invite him into your journey so that, together, we will come to know that God made all of us for Himself, and our one heart is restless until it rests in God.
St. Augustine, pray for us!
