"The greatest Father of the Latin Church"

With many thanks to SPCK, a book which should be required reading for those reflecting on Anglicanorum Coetibus - Great Christian Thinkers: From the Early Church through the Middle Ages.  It is a collection of addresses by the Holy Father on key figures from the Tradition. 

Considering that this blog is under the patronage of St Augustine, perhaps I can be forgiven for quoting from addresses included in the collection on the bishop of Hippo:

We speak now of the greatest Father of the Latin Church, St Augustine ... I wanted to ideally conclude my pilgrimage to Pavia by consigning to the Church and to the world, before the tomb of this great lover of God, my first encyclical, titled Deus Caritas Est.  I owe much, in fact, especially in the first part, to Augustine's thought ... I wished to devote my second encyclical to hope, Spe Salvi, and it is also largely indebted to Augustine and his encounter with God.

Anglicanism's experience of the Reformation was in many ways a rediscovery of Augustine.  Such rediscovery, however, was incomplete, marred as it was by both the political circumstances of the era and a failure to give due attention to Augustine's belief in the catholicity of the Church.  It is fitting, therefore, that an explicitly Augustinian successor to Peter has provided the means for the reconciliation of the Anglican tradition to the See of Peter.