Augustine of Hippo: "Since I began to serve God, as I have hardly ever seen better men than those who live a holy life in monasteries, so I have never seen worse than those in monasteries who live not as they should." After missions in Italy and Bosnia, missions wherein he confirmed his reputation for great charity and prudence, Bd Augustine was sent to Hungary, where the people had been reduced to a bad state of misery and irreligion by continual civil wars. Here he met Cardinal Nicholas Boccasini, the papal legate, who was to become Bd Benedict XI, and attracted his favourable notice, and when Cardinal Boccasini became pope in 1303 he sent for Bd Augustine and consecrated him bishop of Zagreb in Croatia.
His clergy, and in consequence the whole diocese, was badly in need of reform and he held disciplinary synods whose canons he enforced and supported in frequent visitations, and he encouraged learning and the study of the Bible by establishing a Dominican priory in his cathedral city. He was present at the general council at Vienne in 1311-12; and on his return he suffered persecution at the hands of Miladin, governor of Dalmatia, against whose tyranny and exactions he had protested. Bd Augustine had in a marked degree the gift of healing (he had cured of rheumatism the hands that gave him episcopal anointing) and there is a pleasant story told of how he rebuked those who flocked to him for this reason: he planted a lirne tree, and suggested that its leaves would be more efficacious than his hands. God and the people took him at his word, and even the invading Turks respected the wonder-working tree.
After ruling the diocese of Zagreb for fourteen years Bd Augustine was translated to the see of Lucera in the province of Benevento. Here his great task was to eradicate the religious and moral corruption which the Saracens had left behind them; the remainder of the Moslems had been more or less converted in a body in 1300. King Robert of Naples gave him the fullest support and endowed a monastery of Dominicans who zealously assisted their bishop, and within five years the face of the country was changed. Bd Augustine was venerated by all, from the royal family downwards, and when he died on August 3, 1323, a cultus began which was formally confirmed in 1702.
The principal source seems to be a Latin life written as late as the seventeenth century by Thomas Marnavich, Bishop of Bosnia; in this the family name figures as Gozottus. It is printed in the Acta Sanctorum, August, vol. i. See also Taurisano, Catalogus Hagiographicus O.P., pp. 27-28, in which inter alia a reference is given to Mortier, Maîtres Généraux O.P., vol. iv, pp. 461-467: the pages in question, however, have nothing to do with this Bd Augustine, but with another Augustine of Zagreb, who lived a century later.
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(Butler's Lives of the Saints, Christian Classics, 1995)
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