“The first purpose for which you have come together is to be of one mind and one heart, intent upon God.” -Rule of St. Augustine
The Augustinian Order in the Catholic Church has a rich heritage of educational traditions and experience. Their history reaches back to founder, St. Augustine, whose profound mind formulated and gave written expression to the very foundations of Catholic thought and culture. St. Augustine was born in the fourth century and devoted his life to nurturing and spreading Christ’s way of life. This was the beginning of Augustinian Education.
For fifteen centuries the Augustinians have patterned their lives after St. Augustine. Great saints, scholars, educators, and missionaries represent a glorious pageant of Augustinian triumphs through the centuries. This is the legacy of the educators of Austin Catholic High School.
Fifteen centuries later, St. Augustine’s teachings are just as relevant today. Ancient in wisdom, yet up-to-date in its application – this likewise is a keynote of the Augustinian system of education. An Augustinian Educator is equipped to give you a thoroughly modern education.
The preparation of a teacher in the Augustinian tradition combines the deep wisdom of the ages with the modern specialized training in curriculum and method. He/she does not attempt merely to qualify you as a high school graduate, but pre-eminently to nurture within you a plan of life and answers to its riddles.
Complementing the Augustinian Priests and Brothers is a dedicated corps of lay people.
“Let us then adapt ourselves to our pupils with a love which is at once the love of a brother or a sister or a father or a mother. When once we are linked to them in heart, the old familiar things will seem new to us. So great is the influence of the sympathetic mind that, when our students are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other and then thus both they, as it were, speak within us what they hear, while we after a fashion learn in them what we teach.”
Saint Augustine – On Catechizing the Uninstructed 12, 17