The Augustinian motto “caritas et scientia” is a reality present in the ministries of the Augustinian Recollects. There are 50 schools in eleven countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The largest number of students is found in the Philippines where the Order has two prestigious universities in Cebu and Bacolod. In the Asian archipelago, 40,000 students receive every year Catholic education inspired by the Augustinian pedagogy of love.
But Spain and Colombia have the largest number of schools run by the Augustinian Recollects, with nine in each country. There are seven in Venezuela while Argentina and Brazil have five. In Santo Agostinho Novo Leblon, in Rio de Janeiro there are nearly 3,000 boys enrolled while in the S. Joao Batista de Vila Guarani, they have only 60 students.
There are 50 schools in eleven countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Shared mission
The Congregation for Catholic Education on the 8th of September 2007, published the document “Educating Together in Catholic Schools. A Shared mission between the Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful.” It stresses that one of the fruits of the doctrine of the Church as communion, in recent years, has been the awareness that different members of the Church can and should join forces. The number 15 of the said document states: “In this ecclesial context, the mission of the Catholic school, lived as a community formed of consecrated persons and lay faithful, assumes a very special meaning and demonstrates a wealth that should be acknowledged and developed. There are actually 3.759 lay people who are working side by side with the Augutinian Recollects in their 50 educational centers.
The collaboration of the laity in the schools of the Order, far from being a simple necessity imposed by the shortage of vocations, is born from the very same essence of Catholic education, that it is a shared mission in the communion of the Church. The ordinance 14.2c of the last General Chapter of the Augustinian Recollects in 2004, enjoins the major superiors to promote the training of clergy and lay people in the administration and management of schools.
The education offered by the Augustinian Recollects is a shared task between the religious and the lay. They both seek to convey some elements of culture and Gospel values that generate hope and enthusiasm for life. The religious have seen the need to promote the Catholic and Augustinian Recollect identity in their schools, imparting the same identity to the lay teachers, students and parents.
Meeting of educational communities (Madrid 2007).The Pedagogy of Love
St. Augustine has a positive vision of man and his possibilities. In his Sermon 117, he conceives man as “a seed capable of development.” His conception of man is very well reflected in the expression with which he began his Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.” God is man’s destiny. The educative process cannot be other than a human growth open to transcendence, and thus, marked by faith. For Augustine, religion and the goal of teaching have the same end, that is, to achieve the truth and the good.
The educator must awaken the sense of awe in face of the Mystery, and accompany the student on his way toward wisdom to savor the Truth. Augustine insists on the need of a friendly rapport between the teacher and student, because he perceives the need of personalizing the educative action, and that it is only love that leads to the encounter of the students in their needs. Love is the most profound strength of human beings. In the Exposition on the Book of Psalms 83, Augustine explains that “In your heart, God has built a ladder for you to go up. The more you love, the more you rise.” Love, according to the African saint, leads to interiority, freedom, fellowship and solidarity. Love drives for quest for truth that is attained in interiority and transcendence.
For St. Augustine, man's life is defined by love, everything must be ordered by love, which is the motor of life and that leads him to affirm in chapter XIII of the above-mentioned Confessions: “My weight is my love.” Love – friendship and charity is the key of his philosophy and theology, and, therefore, of his pedagogy. “Love – he says – is the essential instrument for achieving an integral formation” (De mor. eccl. cat. I, 58, 26). Science must be achieved through love (Tract. in Io. Ev. 7 , 8). In one of his written works, he writes that teaching and education not born out of love blemish the person of the educator and are not helpful to the students. (De cat. rud. 4,8).
At the threshold of the third millennium, education and Catholic schools are faced with new challenges from socio-political and cultural contexts. New evangelization
At the threshold of the third millennium, education and Catholic schools are faced with new challenges from socio-political and cultural contexts. They are aware of the difficulties beleaguering the Catholic school in today’s society: the phenomenon of incredulity, the crisis of values that results to moral relativism and subjectivism, the instability of the family, the great social divergence, and politico-socio-cultural realities that impede the freedom of education. For many children and young people, the Catholic school is perhaps the only place where they are going to hear about Jesus Christ and his Gospel.
In the document of Aparecida, the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean seek an education that offers to children, young people and adults an encounter with the cultural values of the country itself, discovering and integrating them into the religious and transcendent dimension. “To that end, we need a dynamic pastoral ministry of education to accompany education processes, to be a voice legitimizing and safeguarding freedom of education vis‐à‐vis the state and the right to a quality education of the most dispossessed.” (Aparecida, 334 ).
The schools of this Order intend to be places of evangelization, integral education and inculturation. They offer a quality education and offers an academic venture founded on the Christian concept of man, life and the world. To do so, colleges want to become more clearly visible every day as communities that participate in the educational mission of the Church according to the approach proper to the Augustinian Recollects.
The colleges and universities of the Augustinian Recollects, as the same Church, always have the need to be evangelized to become evangelists themselves. “The new evangelization demands that consecrated persons have a thorough awareness of the theological significance of the challenges of our time.” (Vita Consecrata, 81). These challenges must be discerned to bring about a renewal of the educational mission and a greater inculturation of the Gospel. The Latin American bishops gathered in Santo Domingo affirm: “Education is a dynamic process that lasts a lifetime of the person and of peoples. It recalls the memory of the past, teaches to live in the present and is projected towards the future. For this reason, Christian education is indispensable in the new evangelization.”
Faith in Jesus Christ illumines the entire field of education, not undermining human values, but rather affirming and putting them on a higher level, in a way that it facilitates the integral development of the individual, and is a source of happiness. The Augustinian pedagogy, founded on love, teaches friendship, the responsibility over study; it moves people to work for peace and solidarity, and it leads to the search for the liberating truth. The pedagogy of love leads to the discovery of the importance of interiority, where man finds himself, and feeling loved by God, discovers the transcendent meaning of his own life.
Educational centers by countries
|
PHILIPPINES |
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|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Cebú (Filipinas) |
Univ. San José-Recoletos |
15.969 |
8 |
410/181 |
|
Bacólod (Filipinas) |
Univ.Negros Occidental-R |
9.920 |
10 |
307 |
|
Manila (Filipinas) |
San Sebastian College-R |
7.935 |
9 |
261 |
|
Cavite (Filipinas) |
San Sebastian College-R |
4.607 |
7 |
122 |
|
Talisay (Filipinas) |
UNO-R High School |
320 |
3 |
16 |
|
San Carlos (Filipinas) |
Sto. Tomás-Recoletos |
645 |
5 |
21 |
|
Valencia (Filipinas) |
San Pedro Academy |
302 |
3 |
22 |
|
39.699 |
45 |
1.345 | ||
|
VENEZUELA |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Caracas (Venezuela) |
Fray Luis de León |
800 |
3 |
45 |
|
Caracas (Venezuela) |
Agustiniano Cristo Rey |
1.600 |
4 |
83 |
|
Caracas (Venezuela) |
Santo Tomás de Villanueva |
1.250 |
4 |
82 |
|
Caracas (Venezuela) |
San Judas Tadeo |
1.080 |
3 |
|
|
Tamare (Venezuela) |
Fray Luis de León |
1.200 |
1 |
|
|
Caricuao (Venezuela) |
San Carlos Borromeo |
265 |
1 |
|
|
6.195 |
16 |
210 |
||
|
PERU |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Lima (Perú) |
Santa Rita de Casia |
782 |
4 |
45 |
|
Lima (Perú) |
Agustiniano San Martín de Porres |
567 |
3 |
39 |
|
1.349 |
7 |
84 |
||
|
BRAZIL |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Río de Janeiro (Brasil) |
Santo Agostinho (Leblón) |
2.450 |
4 |
188 |
|
Río de Janeiro (Brasil) |
Santo Agostinho (Novo Leblon) |
2.700 |
4 |
132 |
|
Río de Janeiro (Brasil) |
Santa Rita (Vidigal) |
110 |
1 |
9 |
|
Breves (Brasil) |
Colegio Santa Mónica |
310 |
1 |
14 |
|
Vila Guaraní (Brasil) |
S. Joao Batista |
60 |
1 |
7 |
|
5.630 |
11 |
350 |
||
|
ARGENTINA |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Mar del Plata (Argentina) |
San Agustín |
1.375 |
2 |
85 |
|
San Andrés (Argentina) |
Agustiniano |
2.020 |
3 |
128 |
|
Santa Fe (Argentina) |
Niño Jesús |
704 |
1 |
53 |
|
Rosario (Argentina) |
Nuestra Señora de Luján |
720 |
1 |
43 |
|
Villa Maipú (Argentina) |
San José |
702 |
2 |
57 |
|
5.501 |
9 |
366 |
||
|
SPAIN |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Motril (España) |
San Agustín |
528 |
5 |
25 |
|
Granada (España) |
Santo Tomás de Villanueva |
1.230 |
7 |
54 |
|
Guadalajara (España) |
Seminario Menor Agustiniano |
248 |
3 |
21 |
|
Guadalajara (España) |
Colegio Sagrado Corazón |
670 |
3 |
34 |
|
Madrid (España) |
Agustiniano |
1.310 |
5 |
68 |
|
Chiclana (España) |
San Agustín |
357 |
3 |
20 |
|
Valladolid (España) |
San Agustín |
1.700 |
9 |
103 |
|
Zaragoza (España) |
Romareda-Recoletos |
1.117 |
10 |
71 |
|
Salamanca (España) |
Santo Tomás de Villanueva |
70 |
4 |
12 |
|
7.228 |
49 |
408 |
||
|
COLOMBIA |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos |
|
Suba-Bogotá (Colombia) |
Agustiniano |
1.511 |
4 |
67 |
|
Bogotá (Colombia) |
Agustiniano San Nicolás |
1.163 |
3 |
48 |
|
Bogotá (Colombia) |
Agustiniano Norte |
2.653 |
4 |
115 |
|
Bogotá Salitre (Colombia) |
Agustiniano |
2.818 |
2 |
140 |
|
Floridablanca (Colombia) |
Agustiniano |
1.103 |
2 |
53 |
|
Medellín (Colombia) |
Agustiniano |
1.031 |
2 |
38 |
|
Palmira (Colombia) |
Agustiniano Centro |
562 |
3 |
57 |
|
Palmira (Colombia) |
Agustiniano Campestre |
342 |
||
|
Bogotá (Colombia) |
Universidad Nueva Colombia |
1.240 |
2 |
95 |
|
12.423 |
22 |
613 |
||
|
PANAMA |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos (tiempo completo/parcial) |
|
Panamá (Panamá) |
San Agustín |
2.000 |
9 |
89 |
|
Almirante B.T. (Panamá) |
San José |
280 |
2 |
2 |
|
Canquintú B.T. (Panamá) |
San Agustín |
1.000 |
2 |
80 |
|
3.280 |
13 |
171 |
||
|
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos |
|
S. Cristóbal (Dominicana) |
Sta. Rita |
1.056 |
5 |
35 |
|
1.056 |
5 |
35 |
||
|
MEXICO |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos |
|
Querétaro (México) |
Fray Luis de León |
1.684 |
4 |
129 |
|
1.684 |
4 |
129 |
||
|
COSTA RICA |
||||
|
Lugar |
Centro |
Alumnado |
Religiosos |
Laicos |
|
Cartago (Costa Rica) |
Ciudad de los Niños |
298 |
6 |
26 |
|
298 |
6 |
26 |
||