Three obligatory references to think about the perspectives of Leo XIV’s pontificate are his predecessor, Pope Francis, Pope Leo
Leo XIV represents a fundamental continuity, tempered in some ways, with Pope Francis; In short: concern for a human ecology that takes into account responsibility towards the planet, as part of Creation, and towards others, in a relationship of justice, brotherhood and spiritual community. From León XIII, he takes the concern for social justice that permeates the economic framework created by new technological revolutions (today, those of robotics, artificial intelligence and social networks). Here, we focus on the contributions of Saint Augustine.
Intellectual energy is also a necessity in times of predominance of emotionality and individualism.
From the outset, Confessions y The city of God his best-known works, already suggest two current themes. The relevance of a deep, critical and restless introspection, which would enrich the current intimate and individualistic tendencies, and the reaction to a change of era that represents a setback of great currents of history: the barbarian invasions that break the culture and fragment the overall vision of the Roman Empire, for Augustine, and the setback in the recognition of human rights, international law and democratic aspirations for us.
Specifically: planetary vulnerability, technological revolution, political involution, three aspects accentuated, as in Augustine’s time, by violence, arrogance and brokenness. There are, in addition, four other aspects of Augustine of immediate interest: conversion, intellectual energy, expressive force, and community service. Leo XIV has referred on several occasions, before becoming Pope, to his service in the Augustinian order.
Pope Leo XIV, at the weekly general audience held in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on November 5
Conversion does not come, in Augustine, through any external imposition or any legal reform, but through an intimate process of unexpected gains and painful renunciations, which leads to a new vision of the world, a new sensitivity, a new order of priorities and attention. The idea of conversion, or new conversion, is of interest to us. The pleasures, satisfactions and freedoms that we were supposed to have by doing without God have not been what we expected: discomfort, uprooting, lack of meaning, existential emptiness… It is not the idea of God, which infantilizes and anesthetizes, but the uncritical urgencies of our desires. What would a conversion, a redefinition of our attention and priorities, give us?
Intellectual energy is also a necessity in times of predominance of emotionality and individualism. Emotion weaves strong bonds of community and belonging but separates different groups as strongly as it internally consolidates groups of equals. Combining emotion and reason stimulates listening, reflecting, arguing, and seeking common bases for coexistence. Reason leads us to reflect on the role of truth and lies, on the conditions that limit actions and points of view. In this field, Augustine stood out for great themes such as the tensions between faith and reason, and between love and evil.
The pleasures, satisfactions and freedoms that we were supposed to have by doing without God have not been what we expected: discomfort, uprooting, lack of meaning, existential emptiness.
Augustine was a great rhetorician. The Confessions They have fragments of very high expressive force. Locutions such as: “Love, and do what you want”, “Superior to what is highest and superior in my soul; more interior than my most intimate and higher than my highest”, “Believe to understand”, “The measure of love is to love without measure” and others, have become part of the common expressiveness… We do not have space to reproduce paragraphs that are true torrents of illuminations. Today, the Church, and believers in general, would need to know how to express their faith, discontents and hopes, with creative intensity; enter into competition with the seductions and resources of the imaginary of cinema, music, literature, social networks.
Leo XIV has insisted on the Augustinian idea of service to the community. “ In that one one “, has taken as his pontifical motto, words of Saint Augustine that call for the unitive force that Christ would have to suppose. A union that, with invocation to Christ or without, is so necessary in a polarized society, with an aggressive politics, tired of sterile fights, authoritarian arrogance and unintelligible dogmatisms. Augustine served the community as a priest, as a bishop, as an intellectual, as a teacher – he was not alien, however, to notables quarrels… – Serving the community through thought, action and emotion, weaving relationships between people and groups and modeling shared aspirations and stimulating and hopeful imaginaries, is a high aspiration.
