But Augustine understood something that the architects of civic religion sometimes forget: when the state begins to wear the church like a costume, when political power wraps itself in sacred language not to be accountable to transcendent truth but to claim it, the result is not a holier politics. It is a corrupted faith. The city of man, Augustine warned, is built on the libido dominandi — the lust to dominate. The City of God is built on something altogether different: love ordered rightly, toward God and neighbor. These are not the same thing. They are not even close.
This is precisely why the arrival of Pope Leo XIV matters so much — not as a political figure, but as a theological one.
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