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legacy · ROME, September 4, 2013 AD

Augustinians elect their 97th Prior General in Rome

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Saint Monica
A fresco of St. Monica, veiled in dark blue-grey robes with a golden halo set against a scalloped red niche, holding a bound book in her hands and looking downward.
St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine, depicted in a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465 AD, on a pillar of the apsidal chapel of Sant'Agostino in San Gimignano, Italy.

ROME, September 4, 2013 AD — The General Chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine elected Father Alejandro Moral Antón the ninety-seventh Prior General of the order today. Pope Francis had opened the chapter a week earlier with an evening Mass in the Roman basilica where the relics of St. Monica lie. The Prior General leads the Augustinians worldwide. The chapter that elects him is the order’s highest authority. Eighty-three friars had the vote.

St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, died at Ostia in 387 AD. Her relics were brought from Ostia to Rome in 1430 AD on the orders of Pope Martin V, and rest in a green marble urn beneath an altar in Sant’Agostino in Campo Marzio.

The vote fell on the feast of Our Lady of Consolation, the order’s patroness. The friars of the Roman house announced it “con grande gioia e sincera gratitudine a Dio” (with great joy and sincere gratitude to God).

Moral Antón, 58, is a Spaniard who trained at the order’s International College of St. Monica in Rome and has sat on its governing Curia since 2001.

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Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. St Monica (on the pillar), Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497), 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy (apsidal chapel pillar); reproduction from the Web Gallery of Art — see the original.

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A fresco panel of St. Monica, an older woman in a dark habit and white veil, standing with hands folded in prayer against a gold-toned background.
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