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The Augustinians from the United States provinces have been serving in Peru since 1964.  Peru is one of the poorest countries in South America and our mission is centered in one of the more isolated and poorest regions of the country. The vast majority of the people have to live on incomes of less than $2 a day.

In our ministry we attempt to follow an integral plan of evangelization which as called for by Pope Paul VI in his document on evangelization (Evangelii Nuntiandi) which includes both a spiritual dimension focused on the sacraments, the liturgy and the popular piety expressions of the people's culture.  At the same time there is a need to focus on the great poverty and respond to it through programs to promote health care, operations and medicine, scholarships for students to continue studies after high school in order to break the circle of poverty, and many other programs of social development.  All of this has been a part of these more than 40 years of Augustinian presence in Peru.

Our efforts have been to promote an active church with the lay people contributing their forces to the announcing of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Thankfully, by the grace of God, the innate religious feeling of the people provided a fertile ground in which to work. They evangelized the missionaries about communal values as much as the missionaries evangelized them. In this mutual enriching dialogue, there has grown a sense of the vocation of each Christian, and at the same time some have been drawn to respond to the Lord's call to full time ministry as religious or priests. The increase of native born vocations can be traced directly to these evangelization efforts of promoting greater responsibility for the evangelization efforts of the Church in coordination with the laity. Our Latin American bishops meeting in Santo Domingo (1992) stated that the laity will be the principal promoters of the New Evangelization and this has been our conviction for many years. However, an essential part of any evangelization must be native clergy and religious and thankfully this has gone hand-in-hand with the increased involvement of the laity.

As just mentioned, an essential part of any evangelization effort must be the nurturing of native vocations to the religious life and priesthood so that this particular church has its own ministers and no longer depends on foreign missionaries. The formation process is long (about 8 to 10 years), but it is the only way to reach the goal of establishing a native Church with its on clergy and religious. We thus need the support of our benefactors in order to continue to accept candidates from the economically very poor areas where we do our work of evangelization. It is very costly to provide them with a quality spiritual and academic formation for the future ministry of the Church, but it is an essential obligation in our fulfilling of the Church’s mandate. The condition of extreme poverty which marks most of the people to whom we minister means that it is impossible to find this economic support within our apostolic endeavors and thus the need to find outside funding.

And so we seek your support in continuing our missionary endeavor. Your generosity is most appreciated. We have Mission Offices that can provide further information as well as accept your donations at the following addresses:

Augustinian Missions
Tolentine Center
20300 Governors Hwy
Olympia Fields, IL 60461

or:

Augustinian Missions
214 Ashwood Rd
Villanova, PA 19085
 

A Brief History:

In 1964 the Province of Chicago responded to the request of the Holy Father and decided to open a mission in South America. The Apostolic Nuncio in Peru at the time was very aggressive in looking for help and had great success in attracting particularly American missionaries. As a result, even today, there are more American missionaries in Peru than in any other Latin American country.

It was determined that the Augustinians would assume a commitment to a new church to be broken off from the Archdiocese of Piura and centered in Chulucanas. This new particular church was not directly entrusted to the Augustinians as an Order, rather to the new prelate. Thus it became a Prelature rather than an Apostolic Vicariate. It, therefore, was the juridical responsibility of the prelate, John McNabb, to ensure the success of the new endeavor.

It was clear very early that the geographic reality and the large Catholic population would require more help than could possibly come from the Chicago province. So even before arriving in Peru there were attempts to find help from other provinces of the Order and other congregations. Many responded and the first Augustinians to actually begin ministry in the Prelature were from the Mexican province of Michoacan.

In 1968 the Villanova province decided to respond to the continual request for help that came from John McNabb. They entered into a contract with him to maintain the presence of a parish in the Prelature. Eventually it was determined to have them begin a new parish in a growing part of Chulucanas which was named "San José Obrero."

From 1968, the Villanova province has had a provincial commitment to the mission in Peru. This commitment did not undergo any revision for many years remaining intact into the 1980s.  In 1984 the men in Peru decided that it made little sense to have two juridical entities with two different superiors and councils for the small number of men. Also to help ensure a more stable presence with greater freedom to respond to the needs of the church, we requested to form one region with one superior and council.

Two years later, with a change made in the Constitutions of the Order, the region became a Vicariate and was placed under the patronage of St. John of Sahagún, an Augustinian Friary in Spain knowing for his peacemaking abilities in the city of Salamanca.  During these years (since 1980) a ruthless terrorist organization (The Shining Path, "Sendero Luminoso") was operating in Peru and causing a great amount of death and destruction (which eventually ended after more that 70,000 deaths.)  So it seemed appropriate to adopt the patron saint of peacemaking as our model in Peru.

In 2006 we marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Vicariate. We celebrated the anniversary of the Vicariate in the framework of the Jubilee year in the Order to mark the Grand Union. 750 years ago the Pope called together groups of religious living in Italy who followed the Rule of St. Augustine, to ask them to form a new and larger mendicant order to respond to the needs of the growing cities of Europe. Bringing together such a diverse group of people with customs and habits was not easy and within one month a couple of these groups separated from what is called the Grand Union. Others persevered and became what is the Order of St. Augustine. It is telling that those that decided to separate and not join forces together have all disappeared. Only those that sacrificed something of their own identity to form a new one with others have survived over 7 centuries of the ups and downs of Church and World history. If these groups had not come together under the Pope's direction, it is fair to say that all of them would have disappeared, unable to adapt to the changing circumstances.

This Grand Union was imitated in a small way (call it perhaps the Small Union) twenty years ago when the different American provinces, working independently in the missionary dioceses of Chulucanas, Peru, decide to form one vicariate. Because there were different customs and ways of working, the initial steps were taken slowly, with many fears having to be overcome. However, slowly the vicariate began to take shape. It is safe to say that if this step had not been taken, today the Augustinians in northern Peru would be a small group of older friars from the U.S., attending a constantly reduced number of apostolic commitments.

However, the story is different than that, precisely because this "small union" was forged and with it the beginning of a formation program for Peruvian Augustinians. In light of the positive experience that we had in beginning our own formation program, the Augustinians friars working in two other regions of Peru (Iquitos and Apurimac-Cuzco), also started vocational promotion on an increased scale and the common formation house in Trujillo became the starting point of a new reality in Peru. Today in three missionary regions of Peru the Order is growing and constituting a Peruvian expression of Augustinian religious life whose roots can be traced, sometimes directly, and other ways indirectly, to the union twenty years ago of the Augustinians of the California, Chicago and Villanova provinces of the United States.