Stories

Fr. Augustine Dada

VP of the Pontifical Society of St Peter the Apostle, one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies.

Mission begins in the restless heart.

Augustine is not easy reading. His sentences double back on themselves, his arguments unfold across hundreds of pages, and his world—fourth- and fifth-century North Africa—can feel distant from our own. Yet few writers reward patience the way he does. Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote his own doctoral work on Augustine’s theology of the Church, returned to him again and again throughout his pontificate. Augustine did not just contribute ideas to Catholic theology; in many ways he gave it its grammar. To sit with him, even briefly, is to encounter one of the deepest wells the tradition has.

One thread alone is enough to show why. At the opening of the Confessions, Augustine addresses God directly: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” It is a personal line, almost a prayer, but it carries a claim about every human being, in every culture and century: that we are made with a longing nothing finite can satisfy.

Benedict XVI leaned on exactly this insight in his encyclical Spe Salvi. Drawing on a homily Augustine preached on the First Letter of John, the pope describes prayer itself as an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness, for God himself, to be filled by God—but his heart is too small for what he is destined to receive, and so it must be stretched. Benedict passes on Augustine’s own image for this: God delays the gift not to frustrate us but to enlarge the vessel that will hold it, the way a heart full of something bitter first has to be cleansed before it can be filled with honey. Elsewhere in the same encyclical, reflecting on a letter Augustine wrote to a widow named Proba on how to pray, Benedict notes that Augustine believed we ultimately ask for only one thing in all our prayer: the “blessed life,” happiness in the fullest sense—and yet, looking closer, we cannot fully say what that even is. We recognize it only by a kind of learned unknowing, certain that it exists long before we can name it.

That is restlessness, described with theological precision rather than sentiment. It is not a flaw to be corrected but the very shape of a creature made for more than the world can give.

This is where mission begins. Augustine’s own conversion was not the fruit of a clever argument or a five-step method. It came through his mother Monica’s years of prayer, Ambrose’s preaching, the company of friends, and a grace that had been at work long before Augustine noticed it. Later, as bishop, he would look back on the moment he was pulled into pastoral ministry against his own wishes and see there the same pattern: Christ had died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves. The missionary, then, is never the master of someone else’s conversion—only a companion to a restlessness that God has already placed there.

This is why Augustine can be such a fruitful companion for reflecting on the Church’s missionary identity today. He never wrote a treatise on mission in the modern sense, and he belonged to an age quite unlike our own age of organized global missionary activity. But he left the Church something more durable than a strategy: a way of seeing the human heart itself as the first mission field. Wherever a person is found—in a crowded city or a rural village, in prosperity or in poverty, in confidence or in confusion—Augustine would have us look for the same restlessness he found in himself, the same ache that no achievement, comfort, or ideology can finally satisfy.

The Second Vatican Council would later say that the Church is “missionary by her very nature,” because her origin lies in the saving mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Augustine helps us understand why that must be so. If every human heart is restless for God, then the Church cannot simply wait for the restless to arrive at her doors. She has to go to them—not with certainty about how or when grace will take hold, since even Augustine’s own conversion unfolded slowly, through people and prayers and years he did not choose, but with the confidence that the restlessness is already there, waiting to be recognized rather than created.

Augustine’s pastoral writings make this concrete in a way that still speaks to anyone entrusted with care of others: a pastor is not called to feed himself while the flock goes hungry, but to nourish, strengthen, seek out, and point always beyond himself to Christ. The same responsibility belongs, in different ways, to every baptized person. The Gospel is not a private possession but a gift that was first given to restless people by other restless people—Monica, Ambrose, a handful of friends—who trusted that grace was already moving before they arrived.

That is the whole of it, really. Mission does not begin with a plan, a program, or a technique. It begins where Augustine began: in a heart that cannot rest until it rests in God, and in the quiet confidence that this same heart beats, unrecognized, in everyone the Church is sent to meet.