Leo XIV is a pope of several notable firsts. He is the first pope born in the United States, the first from North America, and the first to have Peruvian citizenship. Following his predecessor, Pope Francis, he is the second pope in over a century to hail from a religious order, and the first from the Augustinian order. This last point is of particular interest.
Even in these early days of his pontificate, Pope Leo has demonstrated, through such actions as his fraternal visits to Augustinians and his frequent citations of Saint Augustine, just how deeply the fourth-century bishop and Doctor of the Church has shaped his life. However, the former Augustinian Prior General is not the only recent pope to be heavily influenced by Saint Augustine. Pope Benedict XVI, who once referred to himself as “a decided Augustinian,” was also profoundly shaped as a theologian by Augustine, despite not being a member of the Augustinian order.
This Augustinian influence on Pope Benedict was perhaps more obvious in his life as Joseph Ratzinger than during his pontificate. As Father Joseph Ratzinger, he completed his doctoral work in 1953 in Germany with a thesis titled The People and the House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church. Where Father Prevost’s doctoral thesis in canon law dealt broadly with the pastoral implications of Augustine’s monastic rule, Father Ratzinger’s thesis in theology aimed to present Augustine’s spirituality and ecclesiology as a model for church communion. This ecclesiology of communion would become a hallmark of his career as a theologian.
Augustine’s influence would continue in the lives of Robert Prevost and Joseph Ratzinger as bishops. For Bishop Prevost, this was displayed during his time as a missionary and later a bishop in Peru. For nearly twenty years, he applied the Augustinian ideal of serving the common good to his work with the Peruvian faithful, guiding them through civil unrest, rampant poverty, and a global pandemic. As Archbishop of Munich and later as head of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger would bring his Augustinian devotion in service to the universal Church. For instance, he would promote Augustine’s view on the relationship between God and history, an interpretation of all history through the lens of divine revelation.
Augustine, in his masterpiece The City of God, responded to the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 by arguing that all world events are subject to God’s providence, directing human history towards its eschatological end. In his 1982 book Principles of Catholic Theology, Cardinal Ratzinger argued that the fundamental problem of 20th-century theology was a misunderstanding of this relationship between history and ontology. He wrote:
Is there a continuity of “humanness”? And, if there is, at what point does the mediation of history begin? If we consider this question, which, I believe, expresses the fundamental crisis of our age, from a strictly theological viewpoint as befits our subject, everything seems at first to end in the realization, which almost no one would contest today, that, except in a few passages, the Bible contains no ontological reflection, that it is, in fact, actually antithetical to the Greek mode of ontological thought. If we look more closely, however, we shall soon see that this notion is a superficial one and can do justice neither to the multiplicity of biblical forms nor to the many possible forms in which the ontological question may be stated.
When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, he continued to explore theological questions from Augustine’s framework, particularly regarding love and the convergence of faith and reason. His first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, fittingly on the nature of Christian love, referenced Augustine’s De Trinitate to argue that true charity reflects the Triune God. Perhaps his most notable discourse on faith and reason was his Lectio Magistralis at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he previously served as dogmatics professor. He said in that lecture:
While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.
This same concern for modern dangers, addressed by Benedict through the philosophical lens of faith and reason, also animates the new pontiff. It is with particular regard to these dangers that Cardinal Prevost chose the name of Leo upon his election as Pope Leo XIV. In his first meeting with the College of Cardinals after his election, he explained that he chose the name Leo in tribute to Pope Leo XIII, who confronted the social challenges of the Industrial Revolution through his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum, the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching. He has stated repeatedly that modern technological advances, particularly artificial intelligence, must be at the service of the common good. Indeed, this emphasis early on in his pontificate reflects Saint Augustine’s principles of veritas (truth), unitas (unity), and caritas (love).
While it is perhaps still too early to predict what sort of pontificate Pope Leo will have, one can safely predict that it will lean heavily on the influence of his spiritual master, Saint Augustine. And we do not have to look too far into the past to see the influence of this Doctor of Grace on recent pontificates. Pope Benedict XVI’s life and ministry can provide us with an indication of the emphasis of Pope Leo’s magisterium: a magisterium devoted to promoting the relationship between faith and reason, the relationship between God and history, the need to uphold the common good, and the relevance of divine revelation in addressing increasingly complex moral questions.
Image: “Augustinus,” sculpture by Marc Artis, 1715. Photo by Didier Descouens – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63341991
Ishmael Adibuah, a Detroit native, is a graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in Chemical Physics. His writing has appeared in ChurchPop, Catholic365, the Liturgical Arts Journal, and the Thomistic Institute. He is also an alumnus of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome. His writings have explored a wide range of topics at the intersection of faith, science, and culture, seeking to bridge the gap between the scientific worldview and the Catholic intellectual tradition. His writing can be found at https://adpetrisedem.substack.com/.
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