The Order of St. Augustine is featured in many webpages so instead of repeating what others have said about it, let me explain to you in just a few paragraphs what I have learned about it.

The Order of St. Augustine is a community of men and women who, with the intention of living their baptismal consecration in a more intense way, have dedicated themselves to the Lord by the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, according to the spirit of the Rule of St. Augustine.  It is distinguished from all other religious congregations following the same Rule by this characteristic:  that it chooses community life as its primary way of living out the religious vows.  In other words, through the practice of charity, mutual forgiveness, reciprocal assistance, fraternal correction, Augustinians help each other live their consecration in poverty, chastity and obedience.  In so doing, the life Order becomes a witness to the bond of communion and fraternity that should exist in the People of God, proclaiming, at the same time, the unity and harmony that will exist in the New Jerusalem of the Lord's Day.

The Order of St. Augustine has a long history.  It dates back to the thirteenth century (perhaps even going back farther than that if its connection with the original followers of Augustine's Rule can find solid historical backing) and is a survivor of the ravages of time and the quirky meanderings of human history.  Among its more famous sons and daughters are the following:

• St. Thomas of Villanova, great bishop of Valencia, so great that he even merited the title "Father of the Poor."  He was not able to attend the Council of Trent because of duties in his diocese; he was consulted, however, by those who were able to go there.  He was known for his care of the poor, becoming as poor as they were.  In fact, He became so poor that he died on a borrowed mat.
• St. Nicholas of Tolentino patron of the poor souls in purgatory, wonder worker during his life.  He bore on his body the marks of his struggle with the Devil but was well-known for his humanity and his spirit of fraternity.
• St. Rita of Cascia, patronness of impossible causes; a model mother and widow who later on became a religious through a miraculous intervention.  She was a stigmatist and one of the saints whose remains are considered incorrupt;
• Fray Luis de Leon, humanist, biblical scholar, theologian, one of the great literati of the Spanish Golden Era.   He was imprisoned by the Inquisition because of his vernacular translation of the Song of Songs.  He was one of the early spiritual directors of St. Therese of Avila.
• Gregor Mendel, Father of Genetics.  He carried out his experiments somewhere in the Abbey of Brno (Czechoslovakia).  I do not know much about our scientist friars, but there is a web page dedicated to Gregor Mendel that you can check out.  Click here.
• and who would forget Martin Luther (The Father of Protestantism who, as a good Augustinian professor challenged the corrupt Church establishment of his time when he nailed his famous 95 theses on a Cathedral door, defending his position using a language (biblical) that during his time has become unrecognizable to an intelligentsia that was more familiar with Scholastic theology and canon law, and ended up outside the Church more because of hatred for the Pope and his cohorts on the one hand and the political machination of German princes who wanted to separate from the Holy Roman Empire, on the other.  (His doctrinal errors were more due to these than to bad research or wrong thinking.)

At its origins (more canonical rather than historical perhaps), the Order of St. Augustine was a gathering into one of different hermit communities that Pope Alexander XIV wished to be numbered among the rising Mendicant Orders of the thirteenth century.  They were originally called The Hermit Brothers of St. Augustine.  Being numbered among the Mendicant Orders (the first ones were the Franciscans and the Dominicans), their special mission within the Church of the time was the life of poverty, and the popular defense of the Catholic faith against wrong beliefs and practices.  Or to put this statement in a more twentieth-century-third-world-type of description, their job was to live with the poor and make sure that popular religiosity was informed by correct Catholic doctrine.   Like the Dominicans and Franciscans before them, the Augustinians soon had to learn to live in cities and towns, far from their communal hermitages.

The Augustinians are not dedicated to a particular way of evangelization.  The Dominicans are  identified with preaching.  The Franciscans with solidarity with the poor.  Salesians are known for their work among out-of-school youths.  For the Augustinians, the life of communion among the baptized is their contribution to evangelization; or to put it in another way, community life as lived by the apostles and wished by Augustine for his sons and daughters, is their primary means for announcing the Gospel.  This is special, since their way of evangelizing is not to be found in the realm of doing but in being.   And this allows for a lot of freedom and creativity.  Thus, Augustinians can say:  "We go wherever the Church wants us."  That is, wherever the Church wants a visible sign of its communion (not necessarily hierarchical) there, the Augustinians can and will go.  This particular understanding of its own identity has opened the Augustinians to different apostolic activities.  Some are educators, others parish priests while some others spend their waking hours translating old manuscripts that only a few privileged persons have heard about.  Some  have established apostolates (like a friar I know who has worked as a school administrator far longer than even he remembers) while others are still experimenting with one (like myself and the Internet, for example).  They do their work in small groups (like the brothers who are collaborating with the UN), or alone (here, I remember those friars who began the evangelization of the Philippines; they lived practically alone in their mission posts, at the mercy of nature and the natives).

Some two hundred years after its canonical erection as one of the Church's Mendicant Orders -- the third, in fact --   the Order of St. Augustine's missionary activity reached Philippine shores.   This was in 1565, the year when the formal evangelization of the Philippine islands began.  From the island of Cebu, they quickly moved on to Panay (where I am now) and to Manila and other parts of Luzon.  The work of the Augustinians was so extensive that until today, the signs of their missionary efforts can be seen in the churches they built (the oldest of which is San Agustin Church in Intramuros, Manila), and their contributions to Filipino popular religiosity (the "pasyon" is as Augustinian as "binakol" is Ilonggo).  They were briefly expelled from the Philippines at the height of the 1898 Revolution, but they came back some years afterwards to rebuild and begin anew.  Fruits of this "second wave" of evangelization are the schools they built up, notably the University of San Agustin (from 1904 until now), the old churches they have regained (San Jose, Iloilo; Basilica del Sto. Nino, Cebu; San Agustin, Intramuros; Old Guadalupe, Makati) and the native Filipino Augustinian Province erected in Christmas of  1983 which comprises some sixty friars working in the Visayas, Luzon, Indonesia and Korea.

Links to the Order of St. Augustine

The Home of the Augustinians all over the world

The Homepage of the Augustinians in the Asia-Pacific Region

More Information About the Augustinians and their Self-Knowledge

The Augustinians and the United Nations (En espaņol)

The Rule of St. Augustine and It's Influence on Monasticism
(This article is outdated but it is the only one out there on the Net)

The Saints and Blesseds of the Order of St. Augustine