Pope Leo the Augustinian

Augustinian Themes in Pope Leo XIV's Urbi et Orbi Message

In his magisterial biography of the great 4th-century bishop and theologian St. Augustine, the historian Peter Brown notes that immediately after his conversion to Christianity in 386, Augustine hoped to retire to a life of contemplation. Having discovered the truth in Christianity, after his long searching, he believed he would finally find peace as his mind ascended to God through philosophical reflection. Augustine attempted to pursue this aspiration in the small household community he maintained in Cassiciacum, a small town outside Milan, in the months before his baptism in 387, a community which included his mother Monica, his older brother Navigius, and some young pupils, and in the semi-monastic community in Thagaste he established with his friends Alypius and Evodius after Augustine had returned to North Africa.

As the years passed, however, Augustine became disillusioned with his goal of finding peace in contemplation. He was frustrated by the intellectual limitations of his pupils. Even more so, he was dismayed by lingering passions which disrupted his concentration and slowed his growth in the virtues. But he also developed compassion toward the similar frailties of others. Brown argues that it was during this period that Augustine began to re-read the Apostle Paul in new ways, coming to more clearly understand our dependence on God’s grace, an evolution in his thinking that foreshadowed his later debates with the Pelagians. Likewise, during this period:

There was no more talk of an “ascent” in his life. . . . A new image will make its appearance: that of a long highway, an iter. The moments of clear vision of truth that the mind gains in this life, are of infinite value; but they are now the consolations of a traveller on a long journey: “While we do this, until we achieve our aim, we are all still travelling.” These moments are no more than points of life “along the darkening highway.” (Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, p. 145)

This transition in Augustine’s life was further reinforced by his ordination as a priest in 391 and ultimately his consecration as bishop of Hippo in 395, requiring him to take up the active life of pastoral leadership.

Robert Prevost, who two weeks ago was elected Pope Leo XIV, does not seem to have ever had any illusions about living a tranquil life of contemplation. A profile of the new pope published at The Pillar describes the centrality of the vow of obedience to his self-understanding, beginning with his formation in the Augustinian Order in the 1970s: “Prevost resolved to always do what he was asked, both within the order and the wider Church.” This commitment to obedience led him to take up the life of a missionary in Peru in 1985, later serving as the director of the order’s seminary in Trujillo. In 1999, he returned to the United States to serve as Prior Provincial of the Augustinians’ Midwest Province, and in 2001 he left for Rome after being elected the Prior General of the order, a role he filled until 2013. In 2015, he returned to Peru after being appointed the bishop of Chiclayo by Pope Francis, and in 2023 Francis named Prevost as the Prefect of the Dicastery Bishops. Prevost is said to have told Francis, again according to The Pillar: “Whether you decide to appoint me or to leave me where I am, I will be happy; but if you ask me to take on a new role in the Church, I will accept.” As a missionary, leader of his order, bishop, and Vatican official, Prevost’s life has been an Augustinian “long journey” of faith.

In Book XIX of his City of God, written much later in life, St. Augustine heaps scorn on those philosophers who, like his earlier self, believe that true peace can be found in this life. How is that possible, when we all suffer, to one degree or another, from the frailties of the body and the mind? Our unruly passions only allow us fleeting glimpses of peace: “Although [virtue] claims the topmost place among human goods, what is its activity in this world but unceasing warfare with vices, and those not external vices but internal, not other people’s vices but quite clearly our own, our very own?” (XIX.4). Family life and friendship offer us some peace, but when family members or friends suffer, it becomes a source of distress for us, while conflict or betrayal within a family or friendship leads to deep sorrow (XIX.5, 8). Political life is characterized by strife and conflict, and even just leaders must resort to unthinkable acts as a result of human sinfulness (XIX.6-7).

Nevertheless, we all desire peace, and indeed can find peace of a sort in bodily health, family, friendship, and political life (XIX.12). We will only find true peace, or ultimate fulfillment, however, when we see God face to face, and therefore true peace can also be called “eternal life” (XIX.10-11). Until then, the Christian believer, “so long as he is in this mortal body, he is a pilgrim in a foreign land, away from God: therefore he walks by faith, not by sight” (XIX.14). That part of the Heavenly City still on pilgrimage “has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as a kind of pledge of it,” but makes use of the goods of this world and the peace they provide while knowing that they will ultimately pass away (XIX.17). Those who hope for this future happiness “may without absurdity be called happy even now” (XIX.20).

(Photo: Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the middle of his “Urbi et Orbi” message delivered from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica soon after his election on May 8, Pope Leo affirms, “I am an Augustinian, a son of Saint Augustine.” But as the theologian James K. A. Smith has noted, Augustinian themes permeate the address. Pope Leo only had moments to prepare these remarks, so these Augustinian accents must reflect insights absorbed from years of study and meditation.

Leo begins the message by making Christ’s words his own: “Peace be with you all!” He then continues:

Dear brothers and sisters, these are the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for God’s flock. I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be, in every nation and throughout the world. Peace be with you!

Pope Leo calls for peace in precisely those places that Augustine identified, in the City of God, as the sources of strife in our life—our families, the affairs of nations, and perhaps most importantly, our own hearts. How can we find peace in the midst of strife? Leo goes on:

It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.

With Augustine, Leo affirms that, to find peace, the Christian “needs divine direction, which he may obey with resolution, and divine assistance that he may obey it freely” (XIX.14). Leo’s call for a peace that is unarmed and disarming may seem un-Augustinian, considering that St. Augustine’s role as a key figure in the development of the Chrisitan just-war tradition and his view that war is practically inevitable given human sinfulness. Even so, Augustine also wrote to the imperial ambassador Darius, sent to North Africa in 429 to resolve a civil conflict over the governance of the region:

[I]t is a higher glory . . . to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war. For those who fight, if they are good men, doubtless seek for peace; nevertheless it is through blood. Your mission, however, is to prevent the shedding of blood. Yours, therefore, is the privilege of averting that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.

Without discounting the tragic necessity of war, Augustine affirms that the vocation of nonviolently disarming enemies is truer to the Christian calling than war. In the midst of wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, today Pope Leo calls in Christians to live out that calling.

Finally, in the Urbi et Orbi message, Pope Leo states: “[A]ll of us can journey together toward the homeland that God has prepared for us.” Here Leo appeals to both synodality, which Pope Francis and the recent Synod’s participants frequently referred to as a “journey together,” and the Augustinian image of the Church on a pilgrimage or long journey towards its true homeland, where it will find authentic peace. Leo here, and indeed throughout his address, fuses together his Augustinian spirituality and a concern for contemporary questions about the life of the Church. His first message to the world, then, offers some clues as to how his Augustinianism might influence his papacy.

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Of Interest…

• Many Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit guides the cardinals when they gather in a conclave to elect a new pope. Others are skeptical, considering the number of sinful and corrupt popes one finds in the history books. Were such corrupt popes truly the choice of the Holy Spirit?

  Taylor Patrick O'Neill
  (whom I interviewed for the Window Light podcast late last year) writes that we need to think about the issue in a different way. He reminds us that nothing happens without God willing it, either by directly willing it via secondary causes, or by permitting it, in the case of evil choices. Therefore, God’s hand is always involved in the selection of a pope. I don’t necessarily agree with all the particulars in O’Neill’s argument, but I think the main idea is correct. I made a similar argument regarding the question of whether God saved Donald Trump from an assassin’s bullet last summer. In the case of papal elections, I would also add that once someone is elected pope, the Holy Spirit immediately gifts that person with the charisms of the office, and so in that sense the Holy Spirit is involved in a particular way.

• It is certainly noteworthy that an Augustinian pope was elected immediately after the first Jesuit pope. Before Francis, there had not been a pope who was a member of a religious order since Pope Gregory XVI, who was pope from 1831 to 1846. As Ricardo da Silva, S.J. explains, however, in an article written on the eve of the conclave, in more distant centuries it was more common for members of religious orders to be elected pope. For example, six Augustinians have served as pope prior to Leo XIV. One strange case is Pope Sixtus IV (for whom the Sistine Chapel is named), who served as pope from 1471 to 1484. A Franciscan who eventually became that order’s Minister General and a noted theologian, as pope he engaged in nepotism and other forms of corruption. Da Silva also points out that a relatively high numbers of the cardinal electors who participated in the recent conclave were members of religious orders. This included a remarkable eight Franciscans of various kinds (including papabile Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, a Capuchin, and Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a Franciscan). Five of the cardinals were Salesians, illustrating the growth of that order. Part of me was hoping for the long shot election of Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the Archbishop of Tokyo, who is a member of the Society of the Divine Word, or the Divine Word Missionaries (I taught at their seminary and college here in Iowa in the fall of 2024).

• In the days after Pope Leo’s election, some Catholics have been tempted to see in the new pope an advocate for their version of Catholicism or their priorities for the Church, regardless of whether those wishes have any basis in reality. For example, on the first Sunday after his election, Pope Leo sang the Regina Caeli prayer in Latin, leading some to conclude that this was a sign that he would restore the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), which had been mostly prohibited by Pope Francis’s 2021 apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes. Among those hoping for such a restoration is Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. In a recent interview with The Pillar, Archbishop Cordileone stated: “I think the vision has to be set whereby the traditional Mass is easily available for those who want it. I would hope that we can come to the time when both forms of the Mass are the ordinary experience of everyday Catholics, and they're just as comfortable in either form of the Mass.” Careful readers will note, however, that this is a far more radical position than that proposed by Pope Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum, the 2007 apostolic letter that made it easier for priests to privately celebrate the TLM and for communities to celebrate it publicly. That document, however, is quite clear that the liturgy developed after the Second Vatican Council is “the ordinary expression of the lex orandi (rule of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite,” while the TLM is an “extraordinary” form of that Rite. In remarks to journalists the following year, Pope Benedict went further, stating that he believed those who are attracted to the TLM “form a small group,” and Summorum Pontificum was intended as “an act of tolerance, with a pastoral aim.” While Benedict believed the continued celebration of the TLM could enrich liturgical practice in the Church, he had no intention that such celebration would be widespread, let alone that it would be part of the “ordinary experience” of Catholics. Archbishop Cordileone also seems to backhandedly blame Pope Francis for being “divisive”: “We had attained [liturgical unity] under Pope Benedict. Then there seemed to be a new war on the traditional Mass that ended up being divisive and with a lot of bitterness. So I am sensing that we can recoup the sense of living together.” But this narrative ignores the reason why Francis eventually issued Traditionis Custodes; despite Pope Benedict’s intentions, the growth of communities centered around the TLM had fostered skepticism regarding the teachings of Vatican II and the validity of the revised Roman Missal (which is not to say that every Catholic drawn to the TLM shares those views). Cordileone ignores the divisiveness that had only grown in traditionalist communities in the years since Summorum Pontificum that Francis believed demanded a response.

• On a different note,

  Elias Crim
  at Solidarity Hall is starting an online reading group on the book Reflections by Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi, the Basque priest who founded the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest worked-owned cooperative business. Readers may be somewhat familiar with Mondragon, but Fr. Arizmendi himself and his thought are not widely studied, so this is a great opportunity to explore a major figure in modern Catholic social thought. More information on the study group, which begins next Tuesday, and how to register, can be found here.

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Coming Soon…

• There are a lot of articles in the queue, waiting to be written! A week ago, Pope Leo XIV gave an address to the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, a non-profit organization established by Pope John Paul II in 1993 to promote Catholic social teaching. Leo’s remarks are noteworthy not just because they provide some insight into how he thinks about the Church’s social teaching, but also because he gives a frankly unexpected reflection on the meaning of “doctrine.”

• As I noted last week, I think the election of the first pope from the United States is a good time to re-visit “Americanism,” the somewhat vague heresy condemned by Pope Leo XIII in the 1899 encyclical Testem Benevolentiae.

• Last week I also mentioned that I would like to write about recent Peruvian history and the Catholic Church’s role in it to provide some helpful context for Pope Leo XIV’s background as a missionary and bishop there.

• Writing a commentary on the 2024 Vatican document The Bishop of Rome, on the role of the papacy in light of ecumenism and synodality, is still on my agenda, as well.

• And finally, I need to write the concluding article for my series on conscience, focusing on Catholic participation in Trump administration immigration policy. The first article in the series focused on the notion of the Church as a Community of Conscience, found in the US bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, and the second explored how The Challenge of Peace urged an examination of conscience for those potentially involved in the development or use of nuclear weapons: soldiers, policy makers, those employed in the defense industry, and scientists.

• It should be a busy few weeks! In addition, next weekend, I will giving a joint plenary session, alongside Matthew Cressler, at the College Theology Society’s Annual Convention. The theme of the convention is “The Locus of the Theological Vocation,” and I will be speaking on "Making Theology More Synodal in the Midst of Crisis.” If you’re attending the CTS convention, hopefully I’ll see you there!