section_path: History/Reform movements
section_name: Reform movements
paragraph_text: Reform movements
  
  In the fourteenth century, owing to various causes such as the mitigation of the rule—either by permission of the pope, or through a lessening of fervour, but chiefly because of the Plague and the Great Western Schism —discipline became relaxed in the Augustinian monasteries; and so reformers emerged who were anxious to restore it. These reformers were themselves Augustinians and instituted several reformed groups. The new governmental groupings were called "congregations" to distinguish them from the already-established geographical provinces. Each had its own vicar-general (vicarius-generalis), but he was under the control of the general of the order. In one country there could be two types of Augustinian houses, the conventual and the observants.
  
  The most important of these congregations of the "Regular Observance" were those of Lecceto, near Siena, established in 1385 and initially had 12 houses. The Lombardy Congregation (1430) had 56. The reform of Monte Ortono near Padua (1436) had 5 convents, the Regular Observants of the Blessed Virgin at Genoa (also called Our Lady of Consolation (c. 1470) had 25. The Congregation of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome was affiliated with Augustinians in Ireland.
  
  Johannes Zachariae, an Augustinian monk of Eschwege, Provincial of the Order from 1419 to 1427 and professor of theology at the University of Erfurt, began a reform in 1492. The German, or Saxon, Reformed Congregation, recognized in 1493, comprised nearly all the important convents of the Augustinian Hermits in Germany. After the Reformation, German houses that remained in communion with Rome united with the Lombardic Congregation. There are no longer any officially designated observant houses or congregations in the Order of Saint Augustine in an official sense.
  
  The Discalced Augustinians were formed in 1588 in Italy as a reform movement of the Order and have their own constitutions, differing from those of the other Augustinians.
  
  The Augustinian Recollects developed in Spain in 1592 with the same goal. Currently, though, they are primarily found serving in pastoral care.