Finding the Treasure

Augustine Roberts is a New England Yankee, transplanted by circumstance first to Argentina and then to Rome, from where frequent travel took him to nearly every part of the globe. The historical era into which he was born, so fraught with personal and communal soul-searching, also made him wrestle with all the tensions of the contemporary church and world. Finding the Treasure tells of Dom Augustine's conversion to the Catholic Church while attending Yale and of his remarkably varied monastic experience during the turbulent years of church renewal following Vatican II. These letters from a global monk will not disappoint anyone fascinated by the paradox of a monk who, rooted by vow to his monastery, becomes a globe-trotter precisely out of deep obedience. Augustine Roberts, OCSO, has been a Trappist monk since the early 1950s. After serving as abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, he became Procurator General of the Trappist Order. In the 1960s he was one of the founders of the first abbey of his Order in South America, later serving as its abbot. Today he is a much sought-after guide, called to help many communities in the delicate task of adapting the perennial monastic way of life to the needs of the twenty-first century.