On the evening of May 8, as a warm Roman sun began to lower itself over St. Peter’s Dome, the 133 voting cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church elected the Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope. Leo XIV is the first Pope from the Order of St. Augustine.
Three months ago, JD Vance achieved what most theologians fail to do in a lifetime: to make St. Augustine headline news. Speaking to U.S. media about the possible Christian basis for the Trumpian “America First” proposition, Vance claimed that such a notion was convincingly Augustinian. Vance argued that it was Christian to have a preferential love for one’s family or nation ahead of wider global obligations to strangers, neighbors, or non-citizens. His comments implied that love expands in concentric circles, diluted in intensity of obligation as it stretches further and further from one’s kin and kind.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In the sound and fury—whether of applause, outrage, or sheer perplexity—that followed, Pope Francis’ voice, weakened to near silence by illness, made itself heard. From his hospital bed, Pope Francis issued a correction, explaining that Vance was a poor reader of Augustine and failed to understand the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which we are taught by Jesus himself what neighbor love is. Asked by the questioner, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus uses the story to teach of a preferential love for the wounded, the weak, and those in need. This option is for all, irrespective of blood relation or nationality, it cannot be limited, and love is not a scarce commodity to be parceled out in rations. Pope Francis rejected a Trumpian “America First’” as a coherent political theology.
Pope Francis could have continued by pointing out that St. Augustine himself had preached on this very parable. Augustine uses the passage as an example less of what we should do immediately for others, but rather of what Christ does for us. We—all of us—are the wounded man lying beaten and bleeding on the road to Jericho. Our frail nature, damaged by our propensity to mess things up, stands in need of grace and salvation. Christ himself is the Good Samaritan. For St. Augustine, Christ makes a preferential option for humanity. Christians are to imitate Christ, the true Good Samaritan, called to view all as nothing less than kin in sin and in the promise of salvation. We are called to concrete acts of love for all of our neighbours.
This is an interpretation of that parable that the new occupant of the Chair of St. Peter will be very familiar with, for he himself is “a son of St. Augustine” as he reminded the expectant crowd at his announcement. Pope Leo XIV, the first Pope with dual nationality, himself a bridge across the strained Americas, joined the Augustinian order in his 20s and has dedicated his life to a combination of deep learning and missionary service of the poorest. In his first comments on Saturday afternoon, in which he explained the choice of his name and his priorities, he reaffirmed this priority for service to the “least and the rejected”.
In a moment where Catholicism has become newly politicised in America, we have, rather unexpectedly, an Augustinian Pope for what appears to be an Augustinian moment. This moment is less Augustinian because Vance re-politicised the ordo amoris and more because, as Augustine himself made clear in his magisterial City of God, written in the crucible of the political and ecclesial crises of the 5th Century, empires and civilisations can decay, old worlds pass away, and new ones be born. Much of what Augustine wrote following the fall of Rome feels breathtakingly prescient to our moment. The City of God, written over the space of around 13 years, was written partly to rebut the allegation that Christianity was responsible for the collapse of an empire, that its adoption had led to a weakening of the virtues that had powered Rome to global dominance. Augustine’s work was one of ‘apologetics’ in the proper sense of the word – a defence of Christian virtue and a public confession of Christian faith as the basis for the true society: for the good, for justice, and true lasting peace. As institutions fractured, migratory movements pushed not from Africa to Europe, but from Europe to Africa, and a new order began to emerge, Augustine interpreted the signs of discordant times.
It is hard to avoid concluding that this has strange echoes of debates in our own more Nietzschean moment. Elon Musk, for example, believes that American society has been “weakened” by empathy and compassion in public life. He has described these as “civilisational weaknesses” to be overcome. In his address from the balcony of St. Peter’s, the new Augustinian Pope made clear that, on the contrary, he views these to be Christianity’s civilising and humanising strengths.
And this is not the maverick view of one man. The clearest sign of the person that the cardinals would go on to choose lay in the short bulletin issued on the morning of May 6 by the Vatican’s press office. It summarised their goals as they stepped into conclave: in the next successor to St. Peter they sought, “a shepherd,” “a missionary,” “a teacher of humanity,” someone capable of leading a “Samaritan Church” close to the wounded, the suffering, and the impoverished, someone who would help overcome polarising forces in Church and society, and someone who would make peace building his goal. That was the man who walked out smiling, a little overwhelmed but entirely calm, into the late afternoon Roman sunshine, to the roars of a stunned and exhilarated crowd.
Leo emerged dressed like Benedict but sounding like Francis. In his comments made on Saturday afternoon, explaining the choice of his name “Leo XIV,” we saw further hints of the likely strong connecting threads between the papacies of Francis and Leo. In one sense, Francis prepared the way for Leo: he spoke often of the fact that we live not merely in an era of change but a change of era. Francis made the Church’s social teaching a central plank of his papacy, and Leo suggests that just as Leo XIII in 1891 made the change of industrial era, its migrations, poverties, displacements, and rapid changes his spiritual focus, so Leo XIV will seek to do so for the digital age of new uprootings and displacements, as well as opportunities.
It is understandable, then, that MAGA Catholics suggest that Leo might hold an American passport but that he is not “America First.” Steve Bannon went on to claim that he will face confrontational and challenging meetings with President Donald Trump.
Yet it is hard not to think that Leo will approach such meetings in a disarmingly different mode. His nature as Cardinal Prevost, was not to shy away from conflict and to speak clearly and firmly, but his manner is almost exactly the opposite of the public persona of Trump. Leo smiles easily, is quiet, calm, gentle and not the master of a sound-bite. He took longer to appear on the balcony because he paused and took time to script each word. His sermon in the Sistine Chapel the following day was not off the cuff (he seems less likely to ad-lib than Francis), but was prepared, read out, considered, and carefully crafted.
Pope Leo is said by those I know well who have worked closely with him to manage conflict by finding ways to bridge differences and build unity. And he is an American of a very different disposition and persona on the world stage to Trump: he represents a different America. In a moment when the joyously plural expressions of being American are funnelled down to a single dominant script, the careful, considered, globally-oriented, calm Leo XIV is unlikely to fulfil the aspirations of MAGA loyalists to a showdown, a culture war or an open conflict. As a son of St. Augustine, Pope Leo has deep resources to play this very differently, towards a dialogue and peace that resists the use of force—what Augustine calls the “lust to dominate”—and makes no surrender to false versions of the good.
Writing in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt, another American bridger of broken wartime worlds, wrote a short essay on the papacy of John XIII. No fan of the Catholic Church as an institution, yet an admirer of John XIII, a Pope of peace and Church renewal and reform, Arendt titled her essay “Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on the Chair of St. Peter.” The title referenced a conversation with a chambermaid on the day of his death, when Arendt happened to be in Rome—a city she loved.
How did a true and humble Christian manage amidst all the politics of the papacy to sit on the Chair of Peter, they marvelled. How, I wonder, might she have described this Pope of the Americas, another dual national who spoke the words “peace” nine times in his first address, and who has made clear his desire for dialogue, closeness to his people, and an ethic of unconditional neighbour love, his desire to, in imitation of Christ the Good Samaritan, do all he can to help us out of cultural and spiritual ditch we seem to currently to lie in, and into a more human, more humane future?
Pope Leo is exactly the person to help Vance, Trump, and indeed the world, answer this question, not by bitter confrontation but by the lived example of being a “teacher of humanity” who raises us all to something worthy of the gift and calling of being human.
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