Fr. Augustin Thorne is a Benedictine priest, writer, and spiritual guide. Born in Norfolk, England in 1975 to a Royal Navy officer and a French classical pianist, he experienced a dramatic spiritual awakening during Evensong at Ely Cathedral and converted to Catholicism at the age of eighteen.
In 1996, he entered Buckfast Abbey and professed his monastic vows in 2001. He later completed a licentiate in liturgical theology at Sant'Anselmo in Rome, where his studies focused on the rupture of sacred aesthetics in the postconciliar Church. He served as Prior of the monastic community at St. Cuthbert’s Abbey in Northumbria and briefly lectured at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy.
In 2017, citing a need for silence and recovery from spiritual exhaustion, he withdrew from public ministry and relocated to a small hermitage in the Shenandoah Valley. He now lives in near-solitude, writing, praying, and quietly offering spiritual direction to those who seek a deeper encounter with the sacred.