Pope Leo: Son of Augustine, Father to the Church
Editors’ Note: This essay is the third and final in a three-part symposium on Pope Leo XIV.
As an Augustinian scholar at an Augustinian university, I have been asked a lot recently how it feels to have an Augustinian Pope. Beyond being delighted that he has readily embraced the dictum that singing is praying twice, I am grateful that our new Holy Father seems eager to bring the insights of such a great theological mind to bear on his pontificate. Yet, what might it mean that Pope Leo thinks of himself as a son of Saint Augustine? Without presuming to know what the Holy Spirit had in mind in prompting his election, I would like to offer a few thoughts about how a pope steeped in the life and writings of Augustine might be a healing presence in our wounded world.
In the first place, I am struck by how Augustine’s episcopate offers a rich model for the Holy Father to follow. With access to a wide variety of letters and sermons, we have an excellent picture of how Augustine both taught and led as bishop. Of course, Augustine was a master homilist, effectively rewriting the rules of rhetoric to evangelize his flock. Yet, he was also a conscientious administrator; Augustine took great care to respond to the concerns of his interlocutors, tailoring these responses to the audience in question. This was not simply a matter of getting them on board with an agenda. Rather, it was a matter of pedagogy; Augustine knew that an ongoing witness to truth and love is necessary for shepherding well. For this reason, we often find him responding to hostile reactions by addressing them openly, calling his audience to the charity he strives to inhabit in the process.
All told, Augustine was remarkably transparent about his decision-making process. Throughout his communications, he blends respect for his flock with the pastoral responsibility of guiding them to greater love. Spelling out the variety of concerns he struggled to reconcile, he teaches them the difficulty of leadership and shows how he understands their needs. He gives them reasons to trust him.
Because of this transparency, we also have a good picture of what Augustine thought about what it means to be a bishop. As Pope Leo has echoed, Augustine described himself as “a Christian with [his flock], and a bishop for [them]” (Sermon 340). To be a bishop, then, is to serve as one of the faithful: as one still being remade by Christ. For this reason, Augustine’s watchword was always humility; he was convinced that a bishop could not pastor except as one forgiven, confessing his ongoing need for forgiveness.
Perhaps most importantly for the Holy Father, Augustine modeled his idea of the bishop on the good paterfamilias. If we have a difficult time imagining what this looks like—authority, too often, appears authoritarian—Augustine reminds us that the good father is animated by charity, and that charity is borne out by its fruits. Writing in City of God that this paterfamilias leads out of a desire to serve and not to dominate, Augustine offers us a vivid portrait of the difference between a form of leadership rooted in the libido dominandi and one rooted in a spirit of service. The former takes every opportunity to rule by diktat while the latter takes every care to cultivate a community of love. Augustinian authority, then, is designed to draw out, nurture, and direct the love of persons, helping them to live together in charity. As Pope Leo well knows, Augustine thought deeply about how to do this in writing his rule for monastic communities. Needless to say, the father of any community must continually examine and purify his loves, begging God for the grace to lead with prudence and charity.
For this reason, Augustine casts episcopal authority as a grave burden, a cross even. Indeed, a longer version of the above-quoted passage reinforces this message: “While I am frightened by what I am for you, I am consoled by what I am with you. For you, in fact, I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian. The former is the name of an office, the latter of grace; the former is a name of danger, the latter of salvation” (Sermon 340). Speaking these words on the anniversary of his episcopal ordination, Augustine warns against the glamour of status and stresses that caritas alone can serve as an antidote to its lure. A spiritual father to many, Augustine well knew that the more one loves those one serves, the more one feels the weight of one’s responsibility for them: Have I done what is best? What are the consequences of my inadequacies for my spiritual children? How do I respond to the harm they do to one another? How do I help them love God and love each other better? How do I help them to trust me?
Aware of his own limitations, Augustine meditated fruitfully on the Petrine office, emphasizing that Peter’s call is to be more than he himself can be. Left to himself, he flounders. Yet, “the Rock had made Rocky Peter true; for the Rock was Christ” (Sermon 147). In offering Pope Leo this model of Petrine leadership, Augustine exhorts his son to lead with humility and charity, clinging to Christ, offering an open ear, and communicating in a generous spirit. We saw this charge taken up in Pope Leo’s first homily: to exercise authority in the Church is “to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified.”
In addition to the example Augustine offers Pope Leo, I am also struck by how Augustine’s moment speaks to our own. Augustine lived at a time of anxiety and political upheaval; Rome appeared to be crumbling, and it was not clear how Christianity could answer the questions of the age, particularly when so many attributed the decline to its influence. We too live in an anxious age, fearful that the current world order is at an end and apprehensive about what is to come. It took a mind of great prowess to critique the pernicious aspects of Roman culture while at the same time appealing to those caught in its snares. Augustine was able to do this because he understood the desires that pulled his contemporaries toward the worst in their culture and linked these desires to the anti-social phenomena his audience grieved. Perhaps more importantly, he revealed them as frustrated versions of deeper ones that could be satisfied in God. Developing this message into a full-blown social analysis in City of God, and showing it in a remarkably personal way in Confessions, Augustine provides an education in how to communicate to one’s age, presenting a mode of loving indictment that ultimately resolves into invitation.
Indeed, as Pope Leo said years before his election, Augustine’s greatest gift was his ability to call our attention to the Mystery at the heart of things, revealing the emptiness of the spectacle that so often commands our attention. This way of communicating disarms us still, revealing what we do not understand about ourselves, voicing our hidden dissatisfactions about our culture, and giving us a reason to hope for something better. As our new Holy Father, therefore, Pope Leo has the opportunity to tailor this message to the circumstances of today, drawing our attention to the destructive consequences of what spectacle cultivates, and calling us to a way of life that better speaks to the restless heart.
Yet Augustine not only offers us compelling psychological and cultural analysis, but also a robust social vision that calls us out of our individualism. Ours is a world that grieves the divisions that plague it, even as it lacks the resources to bridge them on its own. Too often, we patch together allegiance to programs promising peace and justice with an unwillingness to let them cost us too much. An Augustinian pope has the potential to call us beyond this impasse by presenting a Christian vision that is both irreducibly social and irreducible to the sociological.
As Henri de Lubac explained so well in Catholicism, Augustine saw human beings as made to live in perfect harmony. Because we were all created in Adam, the Fall fractured not only the human soul but the human family. Taking up the Pauline presentation of Christ as the New Adam, Augustine developed an ecclesiology that answers the world’s desire for unity and peace by foretelling a day when God will be all in all. Christ gathers humanity back together in himself. This proposal inevitably transfigures the shape of the world’s desire for unity, challenging its immanence and claims of self-reliance. Yet it also offers the world hope, and if we too often resort to destructive methods in our desperation to bring about peace, this hope might be something we desperately need.
Complementing his contention that distorted desire, cupiditas, can only create allegiances of convenience, Augustine upholds caritas as a love genuinely capable of uniting human beings in peace and justice. Though our political societies will always remain imperfect, he insists, we can act as leaven by acting in caritas, elevating the love that animates them. Indeed, for Augustine this is the political task to which Christians are called. Holding together hope and mission, the already and the not yet, therefore, an Augustinian pope can remind us that we are both on pilgrimage to the truly just city, and called upon to be a healing presence in the world. In so doing, he can call us out of the sterile individualism that so throttles us.
Finally, it strikes me as providential that we have been given a son of St. Augustine as the Holy Father at our current ecclesial moment. In anticipation of the papal election, many spoke of the need to repair the internal divisions in the Church. The film Conclave had recently been released, and many described the dynamics at play in political terms. These were cardinals who did not know one another, and who came from vastly different regions and perspectives. What we anticipated was division, and what we got was a surprising show of unity. Something united the cardinals that had been left out of the equation. While there will always be a human element in the Church, and we will continue to be confronted with great evidence of her members’ tragic sinfulness and failings, Augustine reminds us that the Holy Spirit is at work within her. Indeed, deeply aware that the pilgrim Church is not yet what she will be, Augustine reminds us that the Church is not simply a political organization, or a sect, but truly the mystical Body of Christ.
By reminding us of what the Scriptures said about the Church—it is both the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ—Augustine calls his contemporaries to live up to Christ’s prayer, ut unum sint (Jn. 17:21), by living in caritas. Augustine’s ecclesiology, echoed in Pope Leo’s motto, in illo uno unum, emphasizes the Christian’s responsibility to participate in Christ’s mission of gathering the human family back together. Aware of the tension between what the Church is and what she is called upon to be, Augustine ultimately opts for hope. Indeed, a favorite verse of his encapsulates this posture: in the end, “hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). A Scripture passage that appears in Augustine’s writings more than any other, this strikes me as an appropriate prayer for our new Holy Father, and a timely message for the Church when the world so needs the sign of restoration she is called upon to be.
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