Pope Leo, Order of Saint Augustine
Terence Sweeney is an assistant teaching professor in the honors program and the humanities department at Villanova University
Move aside Gregor Mendel and Martin Luther—there’s a new Augustinian on the world stage, Pope Leo XIV. As we all reach for different insights into this new pope, we would do well to consider the religious order he has belonged to since he was undergraduate at Villanova. The Order of St. Augustine does not have a standard founding, or a single founder like St. Dominic or St. Ignatius. Instead, several hermits living in Tuscany were instructed to form a single community by Pope Innocent IV in 1244. This was called the Little Union and was followed by yet another papal call to unity in the Grand Union of 1256. Having two foundings, both featuring a bunch of hermits told to live in community by two different popes, does not make for a tidy narrative. This might be why the Augustinians have long been overshadowed by orders with more famous founders and less confusing origin stories.
And yet. The order’s early history is emblematic of something at its heart, which will also be at the heart of Leo’s papacy. To be Augustinian is to be shaped—like Augustine himself (not the order’s founder but its inspiration)—by a deep sense of both interiority and community. Augustine is known for writing the first personal memoir and the first soliloquy (a word he invented). He was always surrounded by a community of friends, and he articulated a deeply ecclesial understanding of Christ. Where some mystics have a personal, almost individualistic sense of the afterlife, Augustine famously described heaven as a city.
The Augustinians are shaped by this interiority and communality, by their origins as hermits called to community. And so the Constitutions of the Order St. Augustine states, “we always turn back to ourselves, and entering within, diligently work toward perfecting our heart.” But it also states that “community is the axis around which Augustinian religious life turns.” Grounded in a rich interior life, the Augustinian friar is called into a “communion of life.” His restless heart is always yearning to be with God and neighbor.
This combination of interiority and communality is not for the good of the order alone. It is also a means of evangelization and an attitude toward the world at large. Lumen gentium teaches that the Church is a “sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.” Likewise, the order’s constitution says that “Augustinian community is called to be a prophetic sign in the world to the extent that fraternal life becomes a source of sharing and a cause of hope.” Turning inward to find God, the friar goes outward to be with his brothers, and to be both a witness to the world and a servant of the universal Church.
So what will this mean for Pope Leo, OSA (Order of Saint Augustine)? I hope it means that he continues the Augustinian call toward community and away from isolation. Just as popes called the hermits into community, so, too, does our world need this call. We are increasingly falling into our silos, as more people report being lonely and having fewer friends. Our politics is marked by divisive partisanship, and the international community is frayed by isolationism. It was a profoundly OSA moment when Leo opened his pontificate by declaring “peace to all” and emphasizing bridge building, dialogue, and community.
This also motivates Leo’s concerns with technology, artificial intelligence, and social media. While Mark Zuckerberg proposes AI friends on Facebook (to supplement our meager stock of real-life friends), Elon Musk proposes robotic friends who serve you, and ChatGPT tries to replace workers with “large language models,” the Augustinian vision of community means, as Pope Leo puts it, “we continue as a Church”—that is, “as a community of friends of Jesus.” Pope Leo the Augustinian knows we will need this summons to real, incarnate friendship with each other and the Incarnate God. The world summons us into isolation with our devices. May Pope Leo the Augustinian summon us into communion with each and all.
Where some—especially in the Trump administration—see calls to community as equivalent to calls for harder borders, the Augustinian charism sees calls to communion as opportunities to broaden our loves in “solidarity with the human family…especially through an openness to the needs of the poor and the suffering.” To be an Augustinian frater requires seeing the full fraternity that joins all human persons—and the obligation to reach out in service to the unborn, the migrant, the poor, and the marginalized.
It is thus richly fitting that an Augustinian would take up the mantle of Leo XIII, who gave the Church its modern social teaching. If the charism of the Augustinians is the building of community, then the charism of Leo XIV—especially in taking up Catholic social thought—will be to restore a sense of community in the Church and among all people of good will. To do that, he will need to denounce the economic inequality, political polarization, and deepening isolation that mark our time. Leo XIV’s papal motto is in illo unum uno, in the one Christ we are one. The motto—Augustine’s words—expresses for Leo that “unity and communion are truly part of the charism of the Order of Saint Augustine, and also of my way of acting and thinking…. As an Augustinian, for me promoting unity and communion is fundamental.” This unity is no abstraction; it is based on the concrete reality of the Body of Christ, the Church. Thus, for Augustine, “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.” Leo will, I pray, call us out of our isolating hermitages into that communion of Christ.
He will need to bear ever in mind Augustine’s words that “churches are not made perfect by drawing only on the perfect.” Rather, we live in a solidarity of sinners progressing by God’s grace to become the heavenly solidarity of saints. Mercy is the linchpin of an Augustinian ecclesiology. For Augustine, the only one who cannot properly live in the order of brothers is the one who refuses to grant or receive pardon. Leo’s challenge—like that of all popes and indeed all Christians—will be to speak to the reality of sin while always welcoming the sinner into communion.
So much for communion and community, but what about the other side of the Augustinian tradition—the interiority? For an Augustinian, we cannot really be in communion with others if we are not communion with ourselves and God. The Church has a clear social mission, a clear task to serve and proclaim. But it must be grounded in the deep richness of a Christocentric spirituality. In a world of noise, posting, and ranting, we would be well served by a pope who calls us to silence. Not to the false hermitage of isolationism, partisanship, and xenophobia but to the true hermitage of living in Deum—into God.
There is much in our world that will resist both authentic community and authentic interiority. But Leo’s task is not a solitary one. The success of his pontificate will depend on our willingness to walk with him and heed his teaching. Pope Leo quoted Augustine when he spoke to the media recently, “Let us live well, and the times will be good. We are the times.” If we want our era to be more inward, communal, merciful, and Christlike, then we must be those things ourselves.