(ZENIT News / Rome, 06.01.2025).- Pope Leone XIV made meaningful visit to the Augustinian community at the Collegio Internazionale Santa Monica, just steps from his Vatican residence, to join an intimate lunch celebration on Sunday, June 1. The occasion: the 70th birthday of the current Prior General of the Order of Saint Augustine, Father Alejandro Moral.
Earlier that morning, the Pope had presided over a major Jubilee Mass for families in St. Peter’s Square. But it was this informal gathering — a simple meal among old friends and fellow religious — that brought a different kind of significance to the day. Inside the community on Via Paolo VI, surrounded by Augustinian students from around the world and professors from the Patristic Institute Augustinianum, Leone XIV reconnected not just with a long-time friend, but with a chapter of his life that still resonates deeply.
The Pope and Father Moral go back more than four decades. Their friendship was forged in the early 1980s in Rome, where both men lived and studied at the very same Collegio Santa Monica. At the time, Robert Prevost — the future Pope — was pursuing studies in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Alejandro Moral focused on Sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and Dogmatic Theology at the Gregorian University. Young friars then, they shared a cloistered life of prayer, study, and fraternity — the kind of friendship St. Augustine himself would have admired: one built in unity of mind and heart, striving together toward God.
Their paths diverged in 1985. Newly ordained, Father Robert was assigned to missionary work in Chulucanas, Peru. Father Alejandro returned to Spain. Years later, in 2001, the two reunited in Rome during the Order’s General Chapter. When Prevost was elected Prior General of the Augustinians, he named Moral his Vicar General — a partnership that would last 12 years and shape the direction of the Order. The bond between them deepened as they led the Augustinians through a time of growth and renewal.
In 2013, as Prevost completed his leadership term and returned to his home province in Chicago, Moral was chosen as the 97th Prior General. The following year, Prevost was named Apostolic Administrator — and later Bishop — of Chiclayo, Peru, by Pope Francis. The two continued to walk parallel paths of leadership, shaped by shared memory, mutual trust, and the Augustinian ideal of community life centered on truth and love.
Sunday’s lunch was not a grand public event, but it spoke volumes. In celebrating a birthday, the Pope celebrated also a brotherhood that has endured shifting vocations and distant geographies. It was a moment of joy, reflection, and quiet affirmation of the values that first brought them together: intellectual pursuit, spiritual depth, and a common life rooted in the Rule of St. Augustine — where no one seeks the truth alone, but leads others to it in unity and humility.
For the students of Santa Monica and the international Augustinian community, the Pope’s visit was more than a surprise appearance. It was a living example of fidelity to roots, of how deep friendships can survive the weight of office, and of how a life of service, even at its highest levels, remains grounded in the human and the humble.
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