Fr Mario Attard OFM CapOn May 8, 2025, feast of Our Lady of Pompei, the papal conclave made of 133 cardinals, elected Fr Robert Francis Prevost OSA, on the fourth ballot. He took the name of Leo XIV.
As he himself explained later, which message was also put on X as posted by Vatican News,
I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
Another thing which really touched my heart as I saw Pope Leo XIV greeting the city of Rome and the entire world, as the first North American Pope as the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of Peter and from the Central Loggia of St Peter’s Basilica was his simple and profound message. He told us: I am an Augustinian, a son of Saint Augustine. Personally speaking, that rang a powerful bell for me. For different reasons St Augustine of Hippo has always been one of my most favourite saints. His experience of meeting with Jesus is so real and deeply incarnated in everyday life. Furthermore, his powerful spoken and written reflection, backed with a life totally given to Christ and his Church has always challenged and at the same time left in me a huge peace, joy and consolation of the heart.
In his first message as Pope to the City of Rome and the world, Pope Leo XIV immediately struck some main Augustinian themes. To begin with he spoke of peace. He said: Peace be with you all! Dear brothers and sisters, these are the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for God’s flock. I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be, in every nation and throughout the world. Peace be with you! It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.
Spontaneously comes into my mind the beautiful reflection St Augustine pens in Book 19 in his great work The City of God where he defines peace in the following terms: But not even the saints and faithful worshippers of the One True and Most High God are safe from the many fold temptations and deceits of the demons. For in this abode of weakness, and in these wicked days, this state of anxiety has also its use, stimulating us to seek with keener longing for that security where peace is complete and unassailable. There we shall enjoy the gifts of nature, that is to say, all that God, the Creator of all natures, has bestowed upon us, gifts not only good, but eternal, not only of the spirit, healed now by wisdom, but also of the body renewed by the resurrection. There the virtues shall no longer be struggling against any vice or evil, but shall enjoy the reward of victory, the eternal peace which no adversary shall disturb. This is the final blessedness, this the ultimate consummation, the unending end…
The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature. Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal Law. Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens. The peace of the Celestial City is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place.
If Christ is both our peace and our concord for peace. At his birth the angel together with a multitude of the heavenly host praised God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!” (Lk 2:13-14). Moreover, this cosmic peace, understood as concord, is also to be shown in the Church, the Body of Christ. St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians reminds us: For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit (Eph 2:14-22).
The Church is united not only by the sacrament of Christ’s body, the Eucharist, but also in the bond of peace. St Augustine affirms this very important point in Letter 185, addressed to Boniface, a tribune and after a count in Africa. He said: The supper of the Lord is the unity of the body of Christ, not only in the sacrament of the altar, but also in the bond of peace. It is precisely such a Church that can be, as Pope Leo XIV wants her so badly to be, a synodal Church. He said from the Loggia: We want to be a synodal Church, a Church that moves forward, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close above all to those who are suffering. Our action has to translate the love we profess otherwise, as Augustine rightly cautions us in his Exposition on Psalm 85: If our love grows cold, our action grows numb.
To conclude with, synodality saves us from pride, the archest enemy for being Church. That is why St Augustine, in his Teaching Christianity, precisely in its prologue number 6, tells us that God uses each and everyone of us to make us Church. He said:
Let us be on our guard against all such dangerous temptations to pride, and let us rather reflect on how the same apostle Paul, although he had been struck down and instructed by the divine voice from heaven, was still sent to a man to receive the sacraments and be joined to the Church; and how the centurion Cornelius, although it was an angel who told him his prayers had been heard and his almsgiving acknowledged, was still handed over to Peter to be instructed and baptized. And it could all, of course, have been done by the angel; but then no respect would have been shown to our human status, if God appeared to be unwilling to have his word administered to us by other human beings. How, after all, could the saying be true, For the temple of God, which is what you are, is holy (1 Cor 3:17), if God never gave any answers from his human temple, but only thundered out his revelation from the sky and by means of angels? Then again charity itself, which binds people together with the knot of unity, would have no scope for pouring minds and hearts in together, as it were, and blending them with one another, if human beings were never to learn anything from each other.
These were such simple Augustinian reflections which can be found in the deep first speech of Pope Leo XIV. May the Lord preserve him, give him a long life, make him blessed upon the earth, and not hand him over to the power of his enemies. May the Lord’s hand be upon his faithful and humble servant Pope Leo XIV. Amen.
