The World Needs More Leos

Augustine of Hippo finished The City of God in 426 A.D., just as the Roman Empire was coming apart at its seams. He had watched the eternal city sacked. He had watched Christians scramble to make theological sense of a collapsing political order. His answer was one of the most consequential arguments in the history of Western thought: there are two cities — the City of God and the city of man — and the great temptation of every age is to confuse one for the other.

Sixteen centuries later, that confusion is back. And for those of us who study the long arc of religion and politics in America, it arrives with a familiar and troubling face.

America has always had civic religion. From John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" to the providential nationalism of manifest destiny to the Cold War fusion of God and country, the blending of Christian imagery with American political identity is woven into our national fabric. Robert Bellah gave it a name in 1967: civil religion. It is not inherently dangerous. A republic of laws benefits from moral seriousness. Communities of faith have always shaped the civic imagination. The abolitionist movement, the Social Gospel, the civil rights movement — these were profoundly religious in origin and profoundly democratic in consequence.

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.

Robert Francis Prevost took the name Leo XIV upon his election in May 2025, the first Augustinian ever elected to the Chair of Peter. He is the first American pope. He is a man formed by decades of missionary work among the poor of Peru, by decades of study in the tradition of the Doctor of Grace. He carries Augustine not as an academic credential but as a living framework — a way of seeing the world. His inaugural homily echoed Augustine's most famous line: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  He knew what he was announcing about himself.

For students of the Augustinian tradition, the implications are clear. An Augustinian perspective understands the United States, for all its gifts and transgressions, as yet one more outpost of the earthly city — worthy of love, deserving of honest service, but not entitled to the devotion that belongs to God alone. This is not cynicism about democracy. It is theological clarity about what democracy is and is not.

The proper role of the papacy has never been to endorse parties or programs. It has been to hold political power accountable to moral truth — to speak for the dignity of the human person when that dignity is denied, to name injustice when it is dressed in the language of order, to insist that no earthly city has the final word. The church has a tradition stretching back to 390 A.D., when Bishop Ambrose of Milan denied Emperor Theodosius the Eucharist after a massacre carried out by imperial forces — not to make politics episcopal, but to remind emperors they are not gods. Leo XIV stands in that tradition. In early remarks before tens of thousands of faithful, he declared that where there is love, there is no room for "the exclusionary mindset that, tragically, we now see emerging also in political nationalisms."  He was not picking sides in an election. He was doing what popes do when they are doing their job.

There is a particular resonance in all of this for those of us at Saint Leo University. Our institution was founded in 1889 and named for Pope Leo the Great, the fifth-century bishop who led Rome from 440 to 461 — a man who met Attila at the gates and used moral authority, not military force, to turn back an empire. The name also honors Leo XIII, who was pope at the time of our founding — and who inspired Robert Prevost to choose the name Leo XIV. The thread runs across fifteen centuries. Leo the Great. Leo XIII. Leo XIV. In each case, a leader who understood that the church serves the world best not by ruling it, but by refusing to be ruled by it.

We live in a moment when the two cities are being blurred with unusual boldness — when sacred language is deployed for political purpose with little accountability to the tradition it invokes. Augustine saw this coming. He wrote extensively warning us about it.

Pope Leo XIV is reading those pages. He is showing us what it looks like to take them seriously — to lead with truth rather than power, with love rather than dominion, with a shepherd's voice rather than a sovereign's decree.

We often say that the world needs more Leos.  This Pope is showing us why.