Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has shown himself to be attentive to the international situation and the deterioration of conflicts. He has not refrained from making constant and heartfelt appeals for peace. Almost as if to deepen those appeals, in August he encouraged lay people to sanctify the world of politics and work for peace, underlining how this requires a conversion based on justice and truth. He did so in two speeches: the first, on August 23, addressing the International Catholic Legislators Network; and the second, on August 28, to those involved in politics from the Diocese of Créteil, in France.
On those occasions, in addressing the challenges of political commitment, Pope Leo referred to terms from Saint Augustine of Hippo’s “The City of God.” In this way he located the human heart at the center of social and political life and called upon Christians and all persons of good will to advocate for peace and justice in the light of Augustine’s thought. He further provided a masterclass on the social teaching of the Church, in fruitful continuity with his namesake and predecessor, Pope Leo XIII.
“The future of human flourishing depends on which ‘love’ we choose to organize our society around,” he concluded in his August 23 address: “a selfish love, the love of self, or the love of God and neighbor.”The Holy Father began that address on politics and policy with an unlikely theme: the desires of the human heart. This starting point is necessary, however, to plumb the spiritual realities that undergird the world, because the most global of all political realities are founded upon the most intimate movements of the human person. This teaching is one of the guiding insights of Saint Augustine: the articulation of “two orientations of the human heart” toward two different loves: the love of self toward contempt of God, and the love of God (and neighbor) toward contempt of self. These two loves have civilizational consequences, because they correspond to two “cities” or spiritual realities beyond any one individual. There is thus an intrinsic link between the individual and the communal, the ethical and the political, the spiritual and the social.
This means that faith always has a public dimension. As the Holy Father told the French pilgrims on August 28, “Christianity cannot be reduced to mere private devotion, for it implies a way of living in society marked by love of God and neighbor, who, in Christ, is no longer an enemy but a brother.”The question of “human flourishing” can thus never be fully “bracketed.” Not only does the Gospel have necessarily public consequences, but the very attempt to sideline it indicates a spiritual turn toward the City of Man, one by which the deepest truths about the human person are obscured if not concealed. This, in short, is the insight of Saint Augustine’s “Two Cities.” Thus understood, the Holy Father observes, the task of the Church again comes into sight: to serve as a “bridge.” In recognizing the two realities circulating throughout the world, Christians have a special role in naming the deepest desires of the human person: healing, reconciliation and ultimately peace; in essence, it is desire that is love and is satisfied with nothing less.
Christians, however, can only render this service possible, the Holy Father told the French pilgrims, if Christians unite themselves more and more with Jesus, to live and bear witness to him. Thus, “in the personality of a public figure, there is not the politician on one side and the Christian on the other. But there is the politician who, under the gaze of God and his conscience, lives his commitments and responsibilities in a Christian manner!” Just as the great geopolitical conflicts ultimately find their source in the desires of the heart, so the conversion that prepares Christians to contribute to peace and justice within that order of loves must also touch their deepest spiritual interiority.
In laying out this invitation to Christ’s mission, Pope Leo XIV affords vast vistas into Catholic Social Teaching and the thought of Saint Augustine. Above all, he links the notion of integral human development closely with the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. In grounding this theme so dear to Saint Paul VI within the order of two loves and two cities, and with respect to eternal happiness had only through Christ, the Holy Father reminds the Church that integral human development ultimately points us toward the Gospel. He thus echoes Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote in Caritas in Veritate: “It is not a case of two typologies of social doctrine, one pre-conciliar and one post-conciliar, differing from one another: on the contrary, there is a single teaching, consistent and at the same time ever new” (no. 12).
Indeed, with the help of Saint Augustine, Pope Leo links the desires of the world to the deepest mission of the Church. Integral human development is not the Church’s rearguard defense against or correction of contemporary economic and social metrics, but names and responds to the world’s deep “hunger for the Bread of Heaven” that inspires Christians to offer “both material bread and the bread of the Word” to the world, as the Holy Father said in his August 4 Message to Participants in the Social Week of Peru.
Pope Leo presents in his speeches the thought of Saint Augustine as a treasure of great value for the Church. The doctrine of the “Two Cities” is one of his most profound intuitions, but risks becoming lost among the many other contemporary political models. The pope is therefore helping us to retrain our imagination with a politics of hope – an education we greatly need – and calls us to continue cultivating the desire for that hope in an abundant life.
Moreover, in these speeches and others, Pope Leo offers a Saint Augustine for everyone, in an accessible manner not only because of the clarity and liveliness of his style of expression, but yet more so because of his profound clarity about the wisdom that Saint Augustine gives to the world today and in all times. He sees that the Church’s “answer” to the world must be linked anew to the heart of the question to which it would provide a response. Few saints possess better wisdom for the re-articulation of that question than Saint Augustine, whom the Church has defined “Doctor of Grace.”
With these speeches, we also see the deeper resonances of this papacy with that of Pope Leo XIII. Above all, it is the quest for the nature of the social order that characterizes their wisdom on social matters. Just as Pope Leo XIII sought to relate the “three necessary societies” of family, political community and the Church within divine providence even in the face of the final crumbling of Christendom, so the Holy Father places the person and the family, the family of nations and the Church within the spiritual realities of the Two Cities. These two cities are of fundamental reference to all other social questions.
For both of the Leos, social teaching presupposes the harmony of faith and reason, even as that harmony must be proposed anew for each generation. In his August 28 discourse, the Holy Father urged Christians “to strengthen yourselves in faith, to deepen your knowledge of doctrine – particularly of social doctrine – which Jesus taught to the world,” which he said “are fundamentally in harmony with human nature, with the natural law that all can recognize, even non-Christians, even non-believers.” This harmony means that Christians need not “fear to propose [social doctrine] and to defend it with conviction: it is a doctrine of salvation that seeks the good of every human being, the building of societies that are peaceful, harmonious, prosperous, and reconciled,” as the Holy Father told the French delegation. The dialogue between faith and reason in fact grounds the dialogue between Christians and all people of good will.
There is further in both August discourses a confidence that God has entrusted the Church with a wisdom of great benefit to share with this world. Indeed, this animated Leo XIII’s belief that, in inaugurating something we think of as new, Catholic Social Teaching, he was in fact reviving something quite ancient.
Finally, there is in the Holy Father’s presentation of Catholic Social Teaching a wonderful balance and integrity that complements the Thomistic synthesis of Leo XIII: heavenly and earthly happiness; reason (the natural law) and the Gospel; a listening Church and a teaching Church; the unity of Christians in Christ and the witness to peace of fraternal bonds across religions; sin and grace, including in the thought of Saint Augustine; action and contemplation; peace as both a gift of God and a human activity; and human longing and its ultimate fulfillment, which points to the complementarity in the teaching of Leo XIII of both the “subjective” experience and “objective” nature of the human person, and between the human person and community. Thus the modern search for integrity of heart, soul and spirit finds its complement in the integrity of the many gifts that the Church wishes to share with the world as a steward rather than an owner.
Reproduced with permission from La Civiltà Cattolica.
