Today we commemorate the 152nd anniversary of the death of the Discalced Carmelite Father Augustine Maria of the Most Holy Sacrament (born Hermann Cohen). Hermann was born in Hamburg in a well-off Jewish banker family in 1820 (he is roughly a contemporary of St. Thérèse of Lisieux's father or St. Elizabeth of the Trinity's father). His ambitious mother supported his exceptional musical talent and moved with him to Paris, where Hermann studied piano and composition under Franz Liszt; however, the French artistic society caused a complete moral and spiritual ruin for the thirteen-year-old boy. At the age of twenty-seven, the Lord led him to conversion, Hermann accepted baptism, chose St. Augustine as his patron, played his last concert, and entered the Carmel (at that time, there were only two newly restored convents in France – 132 monasteries fell victim to the recent French Revolution and the Napoleonic era). In 1851 he was ordained a priest, and as an eloquent preacher, he influenced society at the time. However, he increasingly felt drawn to silent Eucharistic adoration, and after years he obtained permission to retreat to a hermitage in Taresteix, near Lourdes.
This happy period was unexpectedly interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, and events unfolded rapidly: In July 1870 – Father Augustine was then 49 years old – France declared war on Prussia; however, by September, Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan and captured; after the declaration of the republic, there was renewed persecution of the Church, the two Carmelite convents were looted, and residents of German nationality were expelled. Father Augustine first took refuge in Switzerland, where he served as a chaplain in a refugee colony, and soon was transferred to the Spandau fortress near Berlin, where five thousand French prisoners were interned, whom he selflessly cared for. He contracted smallpox from them, and died on January 20, 1871, just half a year after the outbreak of the war. In 2016, the diocesan phase of the beatification process was initiated.
(processed according to the book by A. M. Sicari, Saints of Carmel, KNA 2011)
