Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost, speaks to the Catholic News Service in 2012 about his order's founder, St. Augustine.The new Pope said: "Augustine gives some insight into helping people understand that having an experience of God brings you far beyond yourself, and that how an authentic experience of happiness has to include other people and has to include being concerned about other people. "And those are elements that express, I think, a very important part of the gospel message. It's not just about me and my experience of God either. You might have people say, oh, I have an experience of God, and I don't have to do anything else. "Well, then that's probably not an authentic experience of God, because as we know from the Gospels, as we know from the apostolic letters, if you love God, then you also need to be showing that by loving your neighbour and that the two go hand in hand."WATCH ABOVE.
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00:00One of the reasons that the Confessions continues to be one of the widest read books in the history
00:14of the world is precisely because of Augustine's insight into human experience. And he does a
00:20magnificent job of communicating both his own experience and what he lived and how that
00:28experience can indeed be a window, if you will, an opening to discovering a personal experience
00:35of God in human life. Augustine in the Confessions talks about friendship, talks about family,
00:41talks about the importance of his mother, talks about his father, talks about human ambition,
00:48talks about so many different aspects of human life, and then goes on to explain how these things
00:54helped or did not help his own personal pathway to discovering God and to discovering
01:01what is really holy about life.
01:13In the highly individualistic society that people are growing up in, people think that my experience
01:21is the criteria, am I happy or I'm not happy? What that might really be is, do I feel pleasure
01:28or don't I feel pleasure? Or do I feel selfish? And if I feel okay, then that's all that matters.
01:35Certainly, Augustine's experience says that, well, that isn't enough. And maybe what you're calling
01:39happiness isn't authentic happiness, because you're going to lose that too. And most things that people
01:44seem to describe is, well, why are you happy today, are things that are either very superficial, or at best,
01:52you know, important for a short period of time, but that aren't going to last forever.
01:56And Augustine gives some insight into helping people understand that having an experience of God
02:03brings you far beyond yourself. And that how an authentic experience of happiness has to include other
02:10people, and has to include being concerned about other people. And those are elements that express,
02:17I think, a very important part of the Gospel message. It's not just about me and my experience
02:22of God, either. You might have people say, oh, I have an experience of God, and I don't have to do
02:27anything else. Well, then that's probably not an authentic experience of God. Because as we know from
02:31the Gospels, as we know from the Apostolic Letters, if you love God, then you also need to be showing
02:38that by loving your neighbor, and that the two go hand in hand.