We are all Augustinians now, it seems. Our new Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, has shown himself a man deeply marked by the theology of Saint Augustine of Hippo, particularly by the Rule that governs the everyday matters of Christian community life. When I hear the Holy Father call us to the unity of charity or preach on solidarity and harmony within the Body of Christ, I am reminded of those exhortations in the Rule of Saint Augustine by which both I (as a Dominican sister) and he (as an Augustinian friar) have been formed. We are to dwell in unity within the house, seeking to be of one heart and mind in God; to glory in the companionship of our brethren, in all their great diversity; to live not as slaves under the law, but as free men and women under grace.

But before we all became Augustinians, for the duration of the conclave which elected our Augustinian pope we were, arguably, all Dominicans. The Master of the Dominican Order, Father Gerard Timoner, has pointed out that we as a Church do not often get the opportunity to witness the “bottom-up” election of a superior by those subject to him. (I would add that our feverish chimney-watching suggests this experience is sufficiently novel to have, if only temporarily, entirely turned our heads.) Yet this kind of secret ballot, described by the English Dominican Father Vincent McNabb as “the most unruly exercise of human freewill,” is for Dominicans a normal and familiar part of our governance. Dominican superiors are elected, rather than appointed; many matters of our common life are decided by the vote of the Chapter, rather than by an exclusive decision of the prior or prioress. And while all in the house are subject to the authority of the superior, the superior herself is, just like everyone else, subject to the Rule, to the Constitutions, and to the decisions of the Chapter.

The Dominican love for voting, electing, and discussing is rooted in the Augustinian principles, well-known to our Holy Father, of unity and diversity. These are held together by the common exercise of patience, humility, and charity—though leavened, of course, by our distinctly Dominican belief that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth talking incessantly while doing it.

For my part, I have come to see the ballot box as a symbol of Dominican life, and in particular of our practice of obedience. It makes obvious something that is—or should be—present every day of our lives in community: our personal decision to obey. Hidden inside the ballot box is a sister’s choice. In this choice she exercises her intellect and will in the service of the common good and takes active responsibility in the life which she, by God’s grace, has committed herself. It represents her decision to freely and knowingly choose obedience—not just obedience in the abstract, but obedience in this community, in this time and place, to the precepts of this Rule.

The allure of “blind obedience,” so pious-sounding and yet so destructive to true human and spiritual maturity, cannot withstand the eye-to-eye encounter with our brethren in Chapter. This is the place where we debate and discuss the reality of our common life and intelligently commit ourselves to the wholehearted living of it, with a clear knowledge of the people with whom we share it—including the superior we have elected from among them. That little box reminds us that each sister is to bring her whole self as a God-given and integrated whole, intellect, will, and even the hidden sanctuary of the conscience, to her exercise of obedience under authority. But that intelligent and freely willed offering of self is not confined to the offering of a ballot to the Chapter ballot-box; instead, it permeates the whole of our common life.

I hope the Church enjoyed its brief taste of Dominican governance. If so, we might want to continue our shared adventure into Dominican life by taking a Dominican attitude towards obedience to the Holy Father. For one thing, it might help us all cope with a phenomenon that seems to weigh heavily on the minds of many modern-day Catholics, which is the sheer amount of stuff we now know about the former Cardinal Robert Prevost.

Thanks to the digital media economy, we are daily bombarded with news of everything the pope has done and said since his election, while simultaneously dealing with the ongoing excavation of everything he has done and said in the decades beforehand. Many have taken to speaking of this news avalanche as a great epistemic burden, specific to the Church of the modern world, potentially threatening to our spiritual lives and in particular our practice of obedience to the Holy Father. But perhaps, to put our minds at rest, we could stop for a minute and consider the plight of consecrated religious who, long before the invention of Twitter and Instagram, knew everything about their superiors simply by virtue of living under the same roof.

Think of me, perhaps. When I cast my ballot in my community’s prioral election earlier this year, I had lived with each one of the eligible sisters for nearly a decade. I knew what each one of them had for breakfast each day; I had met all of their parents, and seen their baby photos; I knew what they liked and disliked; I knew their strengths and their weaknesses. But when I made my choice in that election I knew that, whoever my new superior might turn out to be, the highest and most noble function of my intellect would not be to hoard and analyze facts about her personality and previous actions. It would be to perceive that she held legitimate authority over me and that obedience is good, and thus to set my will towards obeying her, regardless of what I’d see her eating for breakfast for the next ten years.

Dominican obedience recognizes that our intellect and will, the faculties by which we know the good and desire the good, respectively, remain distinct even as they work together. The opinions my intellect might form about the nitty-gritty of what is being asked of me, or indeed of the person who is asking it, do not affect the quality of my choice to obey. After all, it’s that same intellect which led me to the conclusion that such obedience is good and worth pursuing in the first place. In the Dominican understanding, it is this rational recognition of the good of obedience, rather than an absolute conformity to the specific thought-processes of the superior or of the Chapter, which constitutes the fundamental role of the intellect in the act of obeying.

I have recently had the opportunity to apply this understanding of obedience in a very practical way to my relationship with the Holy Father. I have the honor of being the only contributor to The Lamp to have mentioned Cardinal Robert Prevost in its pages prior to his election as Pope. In 2023, I wrote that Cardinal Prevost’s comments at a press conference for the Synod on Synodality were “an excellent example of a corrupt understanding of clerical abuse.” Within my community, I had unburdened myself of my opinions about that press conference sufficiently loudly that when Cardinal Prevost emerged from behind the curtain on the evening of May 8 (we’d all gathered in the common room to watch the B.B.C. live coverage together) our chaplain turned to me as I and the other sisters began whooping and cheering and asked bluntly, “Isn’t he the one you don’t like?”

As the teens in the parish youth group say: what a vibe killer. “Well, I don’t like some things that he’s said,” I replied. “But I like the fact we have a pope,” and the conversation moved on. Now, I don’t think anyone is at their most articulate when surrounded by ten loudly chattering Dominicans (one of whom is the French prioress asserting that the only rational thing to do at this point is to open a bottle of wine) with one eye still on a live broadcast of the loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica. But all the same, I feel that this wasn’t too bad a summary of the Dominican attitude to obedience, offered in the heat of the moment. Sure, my intellect might not like everything my superior has ever done or said; but it likes the fact I’ve got a superior, because it recognizes the virtue of obedience as good.

I had objected to Cardinal Prevost’s comments at that press conference, and I know full well why I found—and still find—those comments objectionable. But I also know that this same Robert Prevost now holds an office in which, as the Catechism puts it, he exercises ordinary and immediate authority over the whole Church, which includes me, for our spiritual good. I’m not made any more obedient to the Roman pontiff by behaving as if I believe every word from his mouth has been a heaven-rending prophecy or every action a sign of heroic virtue. I know that the primary role of my intellect within the act of obedience is not to form hypotheses and projections about our new pope’s likely strengths and weaknesses, his priorities, or his style of governance. Instead, it is to recognize that obedience to him is something fundamentally good, demanded of me by faith, and conducive to my royal freedom as a baptized Christian.

The Rule of Saint Augustine exhorts us to show mercy and compassion to our superiors, and to acknowledge the particular burdens and spiritual dangers which authority places upon them. It might be useful to view this exhortation in the light of our Augustinian pope’s recent invitation to journalists to “strive for a different kind of communication,” one which “never separates the search for truth from the love with which we must humbly seek it.” I have a responsibility to ensure that the words I speak publicly about Leo XIV are compassionate, charitable, and truthful—and therefore do not hinder other members of the Church from rationally understanding and freely choosing the good of Christian obedience. It’s a responsibility I can live out with the help of the great spiritual tradition of my order, as I’m sure the Holy Father himself would want me to.