Early Church Fathers: Ambrose & Augustine – Video

In this video, Dr. Italy discusses the important role of the Church’s “founding fathers,” known as the Early Church Fathers, and why they are still so vital to our understanding and faith life today.  He highlights the stories of two pivotal Early Fathers, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, and explains why we need to recover our past in order to grow in our future.

Family History

Growing up, I loved to hear about the experiences of my father and grandfather, their adventures, trials, ups and downs of life. I never tired of hearing these stories; they gave me a sense of who I was, where I came from, and where our family was going.

We learn about the “family history” of the U.S. when we study the Founding Fathers. And the Church itself is a family with founding fathers as well – we call them the “Fathers of the Church.”

The Early Days

There are a lot of great heroes throughout our Church’s history, all the way up to the present, but the period of the Early Church Fathers (c. 100 – 750 AD) is a unique era, a time when the Church was young, moving from its infancy to early adulthood. This period of the Early Fathers helped to pass onto us the Apostolic Tradition, the vital teachings and understanding of our faith from the first Apostles.

Relevance Today

So why are these Early Fathers so important? What role did they play in the growth and development of the Church? We can still learn much from them, for many of the challenges that the early Church faced from the pagan and secular world still confront us in today’s society.

The Early Fathers can tell us so much of what we need to know, not only giving us a sense of our Catholic history and identity, but also insight on how to meet the challenges of our modern world.

Ambrose & Augustine

In my book, When the Church Was Young: Voices of the Early Fathers, I talk about 23 of these founding fathers of our early Church. In this video, I’ll focus on two individual stories that are closely linked together: St. Ambrose and St. Augustine. You might be surprised at how God called each of them to His service, and how they initially reacted! But ultimately, they embraced the call and played pivotal roles in the preservation and passing on of the faith.

Fountain of Youth

If we want to grow, if we want authentic development, we have to recover our past. We need to drink from the fountain of youth – the vitality of the Gospel as lived out in those early days of our faith, witnessed, safeguarded, and passed on to us by the Early Church Fathers! Unless we keep the fire burning, the Church can become a museum instead of a building made of living stones.

For more from St. Augustine, see the AUGUSTINE Section of the Crossroads Initiative Library.  And for more from St. Ambrose:  AMBROSE section of the Crossroads Library.

For more on the topic of the Early Church Fathers, see Early Church Fathers Overview.