(RNS) — Brother Joe Ruiz always felt a certain restlessness in life.
After graduating from a Catholic college in Austin, Texas, he has worked as an electronics technician for a computer company, a folklore dancer and as an extra for the opera “Carmen.”
But he was always drawn to a life of prayer and intimacy with God.
Saint Augustine’s famous words about God especially appealed to him: “You made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Ruiz found some stability, and rest, in the Augustinian order and in 2013 in the person of the Rev. Robert Prevost, then-prior general of the Augustinian order and now Pope Leo XIV. A “teacher of the professed” in Chicago that year, Father Bob, as he was then known, was Ruiz’s formator, a person who guides and supports individuals in their formation process as they prepare to take their vows and live in community with other men.
Bro. Joe Ruiz, O.S.A. (Photo courtesy St. Rita of Cascia High School)
“The one thing that I really valued about him is that he’s a very good listener and he encouraged me,” said Ruiz, 51, of his trainer. “He’s that kind of guy — ‘Let’s have a conversation, let’s talk about it: What can we change, what needs to be worked out?’”
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From him, Ruiz also learned how to live in community, one of the distinguishing marks of the Augustinian order.
The Augustinian priests and brothers who live at St. Rita of Cascia Parish and teach St. Rita’s of Cascia High School, on the city’s Southwest side, were overjoyed at the election of the new pope, whom they described as a steady, down-to-earth and thoughtful person.
Leo, the first U.S. pope in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church, has spurred widespread interest in the Order of St. Augustine, a relatively small community in comparison to the Jesuits, which the late Pope Francis belonged to. Both were the …