What Saint Augustine Can Teach us About Pope Leo XIV

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27-05-2025

Scenes from the Life of Saint Augustine of Hippo, circa 1490. Credit - Heritage Art—Standing in front of the cascade of crimson curtains on the balcony of Saint Peter's on the evening of May 8, with an emotional crowd undulating below him, the new pope, Leo XIV, gave his first address 'Urbi et Orbi,' to Rome and the world, proclaiming 'I am a son of Saint Augustine.'
Pope Leo XIV is an Augustinian friar. What does that mean?
The Augustinian order was founded in Italy in the 1200s. But it took its inspiration from the great 5th century African saint, Augustine of Hippo.
When he was ordained in 391 CE, Augustine established a monastic community in Hippo (modern Annaba, Algeria), and he lived there until his death in 430 CE. Christianity had only recently become the official religion of the Roman empire, of which North Africa was part, and organized monastic life was at its beginnings. Augustine took care to lay out the fundamental principles for his community, and this became known as the Augustinian Rule. He even wrote a version of this document for his sister, who was the head of a community of nuns nearby. The life of the Augustinian order is grounded in this document, known as "The Rule of Saint Augustine."
The Rule is often considered to be a very humane document. It is deeply attuned to the challenges of living in community and all the minor irritations and human difficulties that arise when many people occupy a single space and see each other all the time. The document provides simple, practical directions for maintaining health. But the Rule also reflects personal attention to individual people and their circumstances. Augustine was particularly concerned about the effects of anger in a community, and the need to ask forgiveness. His passionate commitment to Christianity led to a compassionate attention to his fellow human beings, as well as a fearless urge to correct wrongdoing. He tried to see them all as creatures of God and part of a global community of Christian believers—even in the face of different regional interpretations of what Christianity might mean.
Augustine was born in North Africa, and he spent most of his life there. He taught rhetoric at Carthage (just north of modern Tunis) and even spent a short spell in Italy as official orator at the emperor's court in Milan. There he converted to Christianity, and, tired of feeling like an outsider in Italy, he returned to North Africa to found a monastery.
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But the local bishops spotted his talents and he was soon appointed bishop of Hippo, where he turned his rhetorical skills to preaching Christian doctrine and eviscerating heresy. Augustine had returned to Africa with a son name Adeodatus, born to his African companion, and planned that the son would join him in his new life. However, the Adeodatus died soon after his return, in about 389, and the pain of that loss haunted Augustine for the rest of his life.
These life experiences gave him compassion and empathy for others. His letters, of which some 300 survive, show this again and again. He wrote to the poor and disregarded. When a deacon of the church died in Carthage, his bereft sister, a young woman called Sapida, sent his tunic to Augustine and wrote to him that it would be a consolation to her if he would wear it.
Did Augustine know Sapida? Probably not. But he composed a kind response, telling her that he was wearing her brother's tunic even as he was writing to her. He imagined the way her familiar domestic habits were shattered, now her brother was gone. Her tears, he knew, would sometimes surge up against her will 'like the heart's blood.'
Augustine paid personal attention in lesser matters too. He wrote patiently to reassure a minor official in a border town near the Sahara, who was worried about accidentally eating the food that had been offered as a sacrifice to the pagan gods. (After all, said Augustine, we still breathe the air which carries the smoke of sacrifices.) He wrote to explain the finer points of Christian doctrine to the confused or the resistant. He wrote confidingly to friends, asking for their help in difficult situations. He was indeed, as the new pope quoted, a Christian alongside these people, even as he was a bishop for them.
But Augustine was also not afraid to write to the powerful when he thought they needed correction. When a close colleague of his was framed, imprisoned, and then summarily executed at Carthage, he wrote a furious letter to the Roman official he blamed for the situation. Augustine only had the power of his bishopric to protect him. It may have been more prudent to stay quiet in the face of flagrant injustice; but he could not.
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North Africa was part of the Roman Empire during Augustine's lifetime, but it was also a place with its own distinct traditions and history. That meant that he could look at Rome and Roman power as both an insider and an outsider. He had spent time at the court of the Roman emperor, but he was also at home among the people who worked in the olive groves and wheat fields in the African countryside.
His famous work, The City of God, was written after Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410 CE. The aristocrats of Rome, many of whom fled to Africa, were shocked and angry; their sense of Roman exceptionalism had been shaken.
In response, Augustine boldly retold Roman history as just a small and fallible part of God's overall plan for the world. Rome, which had been the center of empire for centuries, was not an 'eternal city' after all. What was important was the people, not the houses and the palaces. And the people remained as a living community. In fact, Augustine developed the idea of the 'city of God' as a global network of wandering people. They would only come to their real home with God, after death.
Augustine's attention to wanderers and migrants was formed in part by his own sense of displacement when he had been in Italy as well as his experiences in Africa. He ministered to a wide range of people in the port city of Hippo: great Roman landholders but also the African people who worked on their estates; traders coming and going from all parts of the Mediterranean; and the workers who loaded and unloaded their ships. He lived to see the borders of the Roman empire crumbling, and he saw that a world in which one region claims to be superior to another was neither inevitable nor unchanging.
These are some of the views that Pope Leo XIV has inherited: to see the world as endlessly changing and endlessly contingent on God's plan. No nation or region will remain dominant forever; the historical past deeply informs the present, but the story can be retold and, hence, reshaped.
We have yet to see the directions in which Pope Leo XIV will lead the Catholic Church today. But as an Augustinian, he carries within him these two great legacies of Saint Augustine of Hippo: the care for individuals, even those whom others think are insignificant, and for how they come together in community; and the ability that Augustine gained from his African home to see the powerful of the world from the point of view both of an insider and—most importantly—an outsider.
It matters that the new pope, Leo XIV, is a son of Saint Augustine.
Catherine Conybeare is a Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, a philologist and an authority on Augustine of Hippo.
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