Pope Leo XIV: A Son Of Augustine

The new leader of the world’s Catholics hails from Christendom’s oldest philosophic tradition, writes IPA Adjunct Fellow, Bradley Bowden.

On 8 May 2025, Chicago-born Robert Prevost (1955 -) was elected pope by the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals. Addressing the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square from the papal balcony shortly afterwards, Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV as he was now called, declared, “I am a son of Augustine”.

With this comment, Leo was pointing to his past life, most of which had been spent in the Church’s Augustinian Order. As the first Augustinian to become pope, he was also, one suspects, pointing to the guiding influences that would shape his future conduct as pope.

Eighteen days later at his initiation ceremony, Leo again drew on his Augustinian heritage. After declarations of greeting, his first words entailed a quote from Confessions, the most famous work of his Order’s spiritual guide, St. Augustine of Hippo (AD354 – AD430): “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” In these words, Leo appears to be articulating a more traditional focus than that of his predecessor, Pope Francis (1936 – 2025): that the Church and its members must once again put God and the individual’s relationship with him at centre-stage. Citing Augustine, for a second time—who is quoted as saying, “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their brothers and sisters” —Leo then declares that, “I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church”.

If we turn to the internet or the popular press to make sense of Leo’s election and the meaning of his inaugural words, we obtain results that are either wrong or superficial. Wikipedia indicates that Pope Adrian, who served between 1154 and 1159, was the first “canonical Augustinian”, not Leo XIV—even though the Augustinian Order was only established 85 years after Adrian’s death! Whereas many commentators suggest that Leo will be driven by the same priorities as Francis (climate change, gay marriage, transgender rights, etc.), others note that his election has pleased “conservative Catholics who seem to appreciate his more disciplined, traditional style and Augustinian background.” How, then, can we ascertain the meaning of Pope Leo XIV’s election? How has the Augustinian Order and the intellectual traditions that it embodies shaped Leo’s thinking? What, indeed, is the Augustinian Order? How do Augustinians differ from other Catholics?

To answer these questions, we must consider three things: Robert Prevost’s career prior to his election as pope, the Augustinian Order that he came to lead, and the unique intellectual heritage which that Order embodies.

ROBERT PREVOST, “A SON OF AUGUSTINE”

The youngest of three sons, Robert Prevost grew up in a religiously devout household that valued education. His father, Louis Prevost, a World War II veteran of mixed Italian-French ancestry, taught at a Chicago primary school. His mother, Mildred Prevost, of mixed African and French ancestry, studied at Chicago’s DePaul University and worked as a librarian. Leaving home at fourteen, he boarded and studied at Michigan’s St. Augustine’s Seminary High School. Thereafter he rarely spent time with his family. Instead, his life became inseparable from that of the Augustinian Order.

On completing his studies at St. Augustine’s in 1973, Prevost continued his schooling at another Augustinian-run educational institution, Pennsylvania’s Villanova University. Graduating in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science degree, Prevost majored in mathematics, supplementing his mathematical studies with readings of St. Augustine and a course on “German Existentialism and Phenomenology”. In 1977, just shy of his twenty-second birthday, Prevost also joined the Augustinian Order as a novice. A year later, after pastoral work and studies at the Augustinian-run Immaculate Conception Church in St. Louis, Missouri, he took his final vows. As a servant of Augustine, he then went where his Order sent him.

Intellectually brilliant, Prevost’s capacities were recognised by the Augustinians. At their behest, he continued his studies, obtaining a Master’s Degree in Divinity (1982) from Chicago’s Catholic Union and a postgraduate degree in canon or church law (1984) at Rome’s Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1982 he was also ordained as a priest. Combining further studies with missionary work in Peru, Prevost then completed a doctoral thesis in 1987 at the Pontifical University. The topic of his thesis was, The Office and Authority of the Local Prior in the Order of Saint Augustine.

Prevost’s doctoral thesis provides us with the first window into his thinking, as he outlined themes which reappeared in his first two speeches as pope.

The Church errs when it practices “personalism”.

In the Augustinian Order a prior is an elected leader, charged with overseeing the Order’s membership and representing its interests within the wider Church. Prevost’s reflections in his thesis are thus not academic abstractions. Rather, they are a guide to action. Subsequently, Prevost was to serve as Prior Provincial (Head) of the Order’s American Midwest division between 1988 and 2001. He was then elected as the Order’s Prior General (global Head) in 2001, serving two consecutive, six-year terms.

The key theme of Prevost’s thesis is that Church authority is about service and communion with God rather than domination. “The Prior’s office in the Order”, Prevost states, “is not an office of power, but of fraternal love; not of honor, but of obligation.” Authority, Prevost added, is “received from God through the ministry of the Church”. Organisational power in the Church, in other words, is derived not from Man but God. How then is a prior, or a pope, to know God’s will? “The discernment of God’s will,” Prevost argued, “is in no way reserved to the superior.” “The superior and the community which he serves must,” instead, “work together …to arrive at decisions … which reflect a real cooperation with what the plan of the divine will would be in a given situation.”

This model of leadership, it should be noted, does not place the “superior” at the beck and call of either their Church community or the public at large. Rather, it commits everyone to common objectives. Nor is power “derived from the community.” Instead, “it is received from above.” The Church thus errs, Prevost argued, when it practices “personalism”, associating leadership with individual qualities rather than theology and religious purpose. The themes that Prevost outlined in his thesis were replicated in his initiation speech as Pope Leo XIV. Where was the Church to find direction and purpose? By listening “to Christ” and following his path “together” as part of his religious “family”.

In the decade after Prevost obtained his doctorate his model of leadership was applied in several roles: as head of an Augustinian seminary in the Peruvian port city of Trujillo (1988-1998), as Prior Provincial and Prior General of his Order (1998-2013), and as Bishop of Chiclayo in northern Peru (2015-2023). Summoned to Rome to serve in a senior Vatican position in 2023, he then received through his election as pope the chance to apply his leadership vision to the wider Church.

THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION

In a secular and unphilosophical world, Prevost’s ideas appear outwardly remote, idealistic, and otherworldly. They are, however, rooted in understandings that can be traced back through the Augustinian Order and St. Augustine of Hippo to Plato (c.428BC – 348BC), the ancient Greek philosopher.

Before his conversion to Christianity in AD387, Augustine, like most educated Romans of his time, was a Neoplatonist. He thus shared the belief held by Plato, and Plato’s mentor, Socrates (c.470BC – 399BC), that beyond the world of senses there is an “absolute Reality”. In Plato’s articulation of this belief, something is beautiful for us only because it is pervaded with the perfect Form of Beauty that exists in a higher, divine world. Similarly, a horse is perceived as such only because it has within it the Form of Horsiness. In Plato’s time, as in ours, these are concepts most struggle to understand. When one of Plato’s critics “once stated, ‘I see particular horses, but not horsiness’,” Plato responded with the observation, “That is because you have eyes but no intelligence.”

As a Neoplatonist, Augustine may not have believed in Plato’s Forms. He did, however, share his belief that our visible world is but a shadow of the “absolute Reality” that exists on a divine plane. Significantly, as the famed Chapter 10 in his Confessions indicates, this “idealist” understanding of existence remained a hallmark feature of Augustine’s thinking after his conversion. In this chapter, which remains central to the training of every Augustinian, Augustine speaks of “inner being”, of “truth within”, of how the world perceived by senses is mere “images”.

As a newly-minted Christian philosopher, Augustine confronted the intellectual quandary of his time: how to create a synthesis of Christian doctrine and the Neoplatonism that still commanded the loyalty of Rome’s elite. For despite sharing much common ground, Neoplatonists and Christians differed on two key issues: human nature and the obtainment of truth. Perceiving human nature as inherently virtuous, Neoplatonists also believed that truth was obtainable through education and contemplation. By contrast, Christians believed that the human condition is sunk in sin.

Returning to his native North Africa, Augustine hoped to resolve the differences between Neoplatonism and Christianity in contemplative retirement. Instead, his community turned to him for religious leadership. In AD391, this role was solemnised when he was ordained a priest at Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria. Four years later, he was made the city’s bishop, staying there until his death 35 years later.

Despite his clerical duties, Augustine continued his quest to synthesise Neoplatonist and Christian understandings. This quest ended in AD397 with the release of his greatest work, Confessions.

As a work of literature, Confessions is a strange, complex book that has no obvious parallel. In it, Augustine argued that Neoplatonists, in their search for truth, had overlooked a stumbling block: human nature. Rather than seek the truth, people seek reaffirmation of their self-importance. As Augustine expressed it:

… they hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love in the place of truth. They love truth when it shines on them; and hate it when it rebukes them.

Easily glossed over, this was a revolutionary insight that rejected a core assumption of Platonist philosophy and, indeed, of Greek philosophy more generally: that increased knowledge makes you more virtuous. How then to find truth? To this question, he provided an answer that became the core of the Augustinian synthesis: that the ultimate source of truth is God and that we can only achieve full understanding if we are prepared to accept God’s Grace. As Augustine explained, “For where I found truth, there found I my god, who is the truth.”

In these few words, Augustine spells out an understanding of truth that builds on Neoplatonist philosophy but also rejects it. The search for truth is intrinsic to the human experience. But we will never succeed in that search unless we acknowledge God and ask his help. To supplement this conclusion, Augustine brought his most original insight: that there is nothing more important than “will”, be it individual “free will” or God’s will. Will, in his view, must always come before either knowledge or any act of good or evil. It is only through an act of will that an individual pursues knowledge or virtue.

Western philosophy and Christianity became allies rather than enemies.

As the Noble Prize-winning philosopher, Albert Camus (1913-1960), indicated, the synthesis created by Augustine represented the moment when “Christianity” was “formed into a philosophy.” It also represents the moment when Western philosophy and Christianity became allies rather than enemies.

Like Plato, the Augustinian synthesis places little emphasis on outer manifestations of being. Instead, as the Prior Provincial (Head) of the Augustinian Order in Australia, Peter Jones, advised parents and students at St. Augustine’s College in Brookvale (Sydney) in 2021, it places the concept of “interiority” at its centre. At “first glance,” Jones admitted, this is an “abstract” notion, removed from “the reality of life”. Nevertheless, he continued, it captures “what is immediate to each of us—our inner life—thoughts, emotions, motivations—which is foundational to the choices we make.”

THE AUGUSTINIAN ORDER: A MINORITY TRADITION

Pope Leo XIV is a “son of Augustine” not only philosophically but also organisationally as a member of the Augustinian Order. To understand Leo, we must therefore examine the origins of the Augustinian Order and how its theological positions were condemned to minority status within the Church.

Prior to the thirteenth century the Catholic Church rested on two foundations. The most obvious were the secular clergy who served as priests and bishops. It was they who dealt with day-to-day affairs: baptisms, marriages, funerals, and other church services. Typically, these clerics were poorly educated and poorly supervised. Less visible were the monastic Orders, male and female, who lived in seclusion behind abbey walls. Engaged in study and prayer, these Orders were repositories of learning.

The problem with this traditional structure was that it hid its most talented members behind walls. The revolutionary solution to this problem were the so-called “mendicant” Orders that emerged in the thirteenth century. Like the earlier monastic Orders, the mendicant Orders were bound by strict discipline. Unlike the monastic Orders, they did not hide behind their walls. Instead, they travelled far-and-wide among the general populace. Moreover, whereas the secular clergy is organised on hierarchical lines with power vested in bishops and archbishops, the mendicant Orders operate along democratic, decentralised lines. Augustinians, for example, are organised into national or regional Provinces. In Australia, members of the national Province meet every year in Brookvale (Sydney) to debate and plan. They also elect a Prior Provincial as their organisational and spiritual leader.

Highly motivated and highly educated, the mendicant Orders represent a small minority within the Catholic Church. Most priests—and hence, historically, most popes—still belong to the “secular” clergy. The loyalties of this group are singular: to their bishop and his superiors. By contrast, the loyalties of the mendicant Orders are dualistic. Their primary, sworn loyalty is to their Order. Loyalty to their bishop is secondary. These divided loyalties have generated suspicion and jealousy among the secular clergy; suspicions reinforced by the practice of the various Orders servicing parishes and schools through their own chain of command. Currently, the Augustinian Order in Australia operates five parishes: South Yarra (Melbourne), North Harbour, St. Clair / Erskine Park (Sydney), Coorparoo and Mareeba (Queensland). It also operates two high schools: Augustine’s College (Sydney) and Villanova (Brisbane). Until recently, it also operated primary schools at Mareeba, Coorparoo (Queensland), Balgowlah and Manly Vale (Sydney).

Over the centuries, the various Orders have also acted as the Church’s intellectual warriors, both inside and outside the Church.

Of the three original mendicant Orders—the Franciscans (established 1209), the Dominicans (1216), and the Augustinians (1244) —two (the Franciscans and the Augustinians) were loyal to the Augustinian tradition with its Neoplatonist underlay. In the thirteenth century, this tradition had dominated the Church for 800 years. It was about to be condemned, however, to minority status by a new synthesis associated with the Dominican Order and one its friars, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274).

Italian-born, Aquinas will be forever associated with the University of Paris. Arriving there as a 20-year-old theology student in 1245, he became the University’s Regent-General in Theology in 1254. Whereas Augustine spun a Neoplatonist-Christian synthesis, Aquinas wove a Neo-Aristotelian-Christian synthesis that drew upon the ideas of Plato’s one-time student, Aristotle (384BC – 322BC). Whereas Plato and Augustine were philosophic idealists, Aristotle was an empiricist who associated knowledge with observable objects. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps, Aquinas argued that, “Our natural knowledge begins with sense. Hence our natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by sensible things.” Based on this conclusion, Aquinas drew a distinction between “natural” knowledge and divine knowledge that could only be understood through faith and Biblical scripture.

For Western civilisation, the Aristotelian revolution which Aquinas initiated proved a double-edged sword. Theoretically, it legitimated empirical research. On the other hand, it made the Church more intrusive in secular research. When Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested, based on observations, that Aristotle was wrong and the earth was not the centre of the universe, he was treated as a heretic. Within the Church, Aquinas’s ideas became the new orthodoxy. As the French historian, Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) observed, “The long and short of it is simply that, in matters of theology, one cannot be right against Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

The ascendancy of the Aquinas-Aristotelian synthesis meant that the Catholic Church contained within it two distinct philosophical traditions: a majority tradition that emphasised Aristotelian reason and a minority tradition that placed greater emphasis on inner-being and faith. In 1527, the tension between the two exploded when a German Augustinian, Martin Luther (1483 – 1546), split the Catholic Church asunder when he insisted that it is through “faith alone” that one finds salvation.

Luther’s stance was true to his Order’s intellectual traditions. For those Augustinians who remained loyal to the Catholic Church, however, Luther’s actions confirmed their minority status.

WHERE TO FOR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?

Why has the Catholic Church turned to an Augustinian as pope for the first time in its history? In a world dominated by secular concerns, it seems doubly odd that the Church would elect someone who represents a tradition steeped in religious and philosophic idealism; one that looks inward to faith, emotion, feeling, and inner-being. Pope Leo XIV is not, however, the only recent pope who has shown sympathy for the Augustinian tradition. Pope Francis’s predecessor, Joseph Ratzinger (1927 – 2022), who served as Pope Benedict XVI, did his doctoral thesis on St. Augustine and his theological doctrine. This intellectual commonality suggests that Pope Leo XIV’s world view probably has more in common with Benedict than Francis.

Francis left behind a deeply divided Church.

It is also evident that Francis left behind a deeply divided Church; one that pits those concerned about matters such as gay marriage and transgender rights against socially conservative Catholics in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. At the very least, Pope Leo XIV’s election suggests a truce between the two sides. Leo is not a young man. He will turn 70 in September. His papacy may, therefore, be short; an interregnum in which Leo is expected to prioritise more-traditional concerns (faith, Church unity, etc.) while making superficial gestures in favour of issues like climate change. A reading of his speeches as pope, and any study of his life, however, suggests that Pope Leo XIV is a man of strong convictions. He is “a son of Augustine”, an upholder of the Church’s oldest philosophic tradition. In his initiation speech, he spoke constantly about a “missionary Church” founded upon faith. This suggests a more religiously active Church that priorities recruitment in places like Latin America and Africa. If this is the case, then those hoping for a pope who replicates Francis’s papacy are in for disappointment.

This article from the Winter 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Adjunct Fellow, Bradley Bowden.