Pope Leo’s Rule

How are we to understand our new pope? My former prioress, Sister Julie, might have the beginnings of an answer. When I was a junior professed (and therefore should have known better), Sister Julie would often ask me to carry out certain manual jobs in the house or the garden, and sometimes I would respond by arguing—entirely unnecessarily—that actually I would be better off completing the task differently than she had asked. Sister Julie would never argue her case with me in response. Instead, she would simply fold her arms, smile beatifically, and say, “Righty-ho.” Then, when I returned a few minutes later—fingernails broken off, eyebrows singed, covered in paint, weeping—she would say, “It doesn’t matter. The reason I didn’t insist you did what I asked was because I knew you’d find out soon enough why I asked. After all, I only ask you to do something if it’s a good thing to do.”

Sister Julie’s method of recharging a car battery or painting the garden furniture was not, of course, the absolute foundation of my religious obedience as a junior sister. But these tasks were, nevertheless, a sufficiently practical—and dangerous—setting to learn, in a satisfyingly in-your-face sort of way, something of great importance to religious life: the true nature of spiritual unity.

When we religious are required to do something, we are never asked to do it mindlessly and perfunctorily. We do not act out of a servile fear of what our disordered nature would do if left to its own devices, or a childish desire to please our superior. Instead, we knowingly choose to observe the precepts of our religious life because we understand that, when embraced in freedom, they lead us deeper into communion with each other and with God.

Sister Julie’s efforts to develop my understanding of the common good were not merely on the level of manual labor. She wanted me to understand that unthinking conformity in external actions is not a genuine spiritual fruit of the common life. Instead, we are striving for a much more profound connection among ourselves: a connection on the level of heart and mind, which draws us on to our shared goal through common knowledge of God, common desire for Him, and common understanding of how, through this life, we are called to seek Him.

We might call that connection “unity.”

I often think of my time working in the garden as a junior professed when I read the first chapter of the Rule of Saint Augustine, the fifth-century text by which I have been formed as a Dominican sister. There, the Rule reminds us that “before all things, most dear [sisters], we must love God, and after Him our neighbor,” and therefore we are called to “dwell together in unity in the house and be of one mind and one heart in God.” Or, as Sister Julie might put it, we are all called to understand that the Rule is only asking us to do something if it’s a good thing to do—and good not simply for the brain or for the body, but good for the strength of our Christian community, and ultimately for our growth in holiness.

This unity of heart and mind with which Saint Augustine begins his Rule is essential to understanding the kind of religious life I lead as a Dominican sister. But it will also prove essential in understanding our new pope. Pope Leo XIV, as an Augustinian friar, has been formed by this same Rule. His love for Saint Augustine is clear to anybody who follows the ecclesiastical news cycle, or who is in the habit of repeatedly clicking “refresh” on the Vatican website. He has quoted the Doctor of Grace multiple times in homilies and during Wednesday audiences and addresses to fellow religious, and the Augustinian theme to which he has most regularly turned is that of unity.

For the average churchgoing Catholic who wishes to understand something of the new Holy Father beyond his personal predilections for baseball teams and pizza and yet lacks any knowledge of Augustinian spirituality, the prospect of reckoning with this aspect of the Holy Father might seem a little daunting. Where exactly are we to begin our acquaintance with Augustine’s theology, absent any Augustinian formation ourselves? His treatise De Trinitate? All one thousand pages of The City of God? His Confessions—not just the nice part about restless hearts but the whole thing, even the densely philosophical chapters lurking at the end? Or perhaps some other work entirely?

I am no Augustinian scholar. But I am an Augustinian of some sort. And I can think of no better place to begin to gain an understanding of the spirituality of Saint Augustine, and by extension his spiritual son Pope Leo XIV, than the twelve brief chapters of his Rule for community life. Here, much—I might dare to say all—of what is essential to Augustine’s theology is condensed and made practical, applied in strikingly straightforward ways to the very place where our witness to our Catholic faith should be most powerfully and manifestly obvious: the way we live together.

The Rule of Saint Augustine, written around A.D. 400, is the first monastic rule of Latin Christianity. Its vision of the common life is built on the twin inspirations of the Desert Fathers and the life of the Church in Jerusalem as described in the Acts of the Apostles. It also draws more immediately on the practical experience of the community of clerics which Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, gathered around himself from 395 onward. Augustine had become preoccupied with the importance of unity in the Christian life—“perhaps because he saw so little of it around him,” as the Dominican theologian Father Aidan Nichols has dryly observed—and, as both a pastor and a student of monasticism, had come to cherish spiritual unity as both the foundation of Christian community and an eloquent witness against the anti-evangelical forces of materialism, avarice, and vainglory.

But Augustine’s understanding of unity is not simply copy-and-pasted from his monastic inspirations. Traditionally, the unity for which a monk strives is interior: Monastic life is characterized by the desire for an inner integration of the powers of the soul. But over the course of his pastoral ministry Augustine became increasingly concerned, as we see in his commentaries on the Psalms, with interpersonal unity. Eventually, when he came to write his Rule, he began with an allusion to Psalm 68:6, which, in the translation he used, describes God as the one who “brings those of one mind together in one house” (rather than, as we have it in the New Revised Standard Version, the one who “gives the desolate a home to live in”). It is from this scriptural basis that he exhorts the brethren to dwell together in unity in the house.

This emphasis on interpersonal unity is unsurprising given Augustine’s other theological preoccupation during this time: the Trinity. Augustine’s treatise De Trinitate was begun in 400, though not completed until many years later, and his understanding of the Trinity as the origin and goal of human life is subtly present throughout the Rule he composed that same year. The community life described in the Rule, a communion of charity in which personal distinctions are preserved rather than eradicated, is fundamentally a life lived according to the pattern of the Trinity. As a result, the Rule views the monk not first and foremost as under a superior and a Rule (as is arguably the case in a Rule like Saint Benedict’s), but instead as within a community: a community which will become for him both a catechesis on the inner life of the triune God and the graced means to enter into it.

When we hear the Holy Father preaching on the need for unity within the Church, we would do well to have the first chapter of the Rule in mind. The unity to which he is calling us is not a purely superficial unity held together only by fear of wrongdoing or desire to please. It is, instead, the spiritual unity of heart and mind that begins and ends with our vocation to union with the trinitarian God.

The first chapter of the Rule moves on from the high theological ideal of trinitarian unity to discuss something surprisingly, perhaps disappointingly, prosaic: food and clothes. “Call not anything your own, but let all things be held in common among you,” says Augustine. “Food and clothing should be distributed to each one of you by your superior, not in equal measure to all, because all are not equally strong, but rather to each according to his need.” But tellingly, this paragraph of the Rule is the first to contain a direct quotation from Scripture: “For thus you read in the Acts of the Apostles that ‘all things were in common to them, and distribution was made to every man according as he had need.’” An equally appropriate spiritual gloss on this paragraph would be one of Augustine’s favored verses, from the Gospel of John: “If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar.”

For Augustine, the common ownership of temporal goods—what would eventually be known as the evangelical counsel of poverty—is the first realization of fraternal love in community. While in his early preaching and teaching he presents such common ownership primarily as a personal liberation from selfishness, in later texts he treats it as beneficial for the spiritual health of Christian communities. Consistently, however, he describes it as a path to the deepest of spiritual truths. In the Augustinian model of community life, evangelical poverty is how we make blindingly obvious, both to ourselves and others, the trinitarian ideal of diversity within unity to which the Rule holds us, and which was also apparent in the Church in Jerusalem.

There are two specific lessons we can take from the Rule’s presentation of evangelical poverty. First, true spiritual unity maintains legitimate diversity. Unity does not require an artificial or unnatural uniformity, one which cannot cope with the fact that (for instance) one sister is prone to chills in winter and needs extra layers, while another is too frail to fast extensively without becoming ill. Second, this unity can and must be manifest in even the simplest matters of common life. Rightful distinctions in the distribution of goods are not a means to cultivate divisions within the community; instead, they should strengthen the commitment to the common good.

Pope Leo, of course, will not be issuing apostolic exhortations telling us how to dress and eat. But the Rule by which he has been formed provides the principles needed to navigate ecclesial dilemmas and disputes. First, are we promoting unity while not demanding uniformity? Second, are we encouraging diversity while avoiding division? This is the Rule’s trinitarian ideal, and it applies not only to religious houses but to dioceses and parishes, new ecclesiastical communities and Jubilee Year pilgrimages; it applies to our liturgical praxis, our catechesis, and our attitude towards our pastors. As the Rule makes clear, it must be put into practice not on the level of ideals but of practicalities. And while Leo does not have a pantry and clothes cupboard for the entire Church militant, he has something analogous, I suggest, in the subject of his own doctoral studies: canon law. Our rights and responsibilities within the Body of Christ, rooted in the common calling of our baptism yet proper to our states of life, are the shared goods of the ecclesial day-to-day where the pastor of the universal Church can work to uphold unity against uniformity and diversity against division.

This mention of law might invite a comparison with Pope Francis and his distinctive practice of governance. The temptation to compare a pope with his immediate predecessor is perhaps not always helpful or edifying. But for now, it is safe to assume that the lead-by-motu-proprio style of governance which characterized the Francis pontificate, heavy on papal personality and preference, is unlikely to be replicated by Leo—not least because it is largely incompatible with Augustine’s vision of authority and obedience. The Rule’s chapter on obedience is at pains to place the superior within, rather than above or outside, the community. It begins by defining some of the rightful limits on her authority, before reminding us that she “should not take pleasure in ruling you, but rather in serving you with all charity.” She must lead by example in patience and humility, remembering she is subject to the Rule as much as the rest of the community is, and to “let fear prostrate [her] at your feet before God” for the account she must give of her governance.

Augustine’s description of a religious superior as one who humbly guides a community as the first among equals can be something of a shock to those who see religious life as a kind of well-meaning, ethereal authoritarianism. Another shock is in store when we reach the end of the chapter, where Augustine reminds us that to obey is not only an act of faith in God but an act of mercy to the superior. By a “thorough obedience,” he tells us, you “show mercy not only to yourselves, but to [her] who, being in the higher position among you, is therefore in greater danger.” Even in the practice of authority and obedience, the unity of the community is to be safeguarded; the superior is not to be seen as separate from, or even above, that communion of love in which she has been formed.

We see here, I think, several Augustines speaking at once: the bishop of Hippo, who knew of the spiritual dangers to which those in authority are vulnerable; the community member who loved his brethren; the author of the Confessions, acutely aware of his own frailty and gratefully dependent upon divine and human mercy. The guiding principle here is one common to all healthy and flourishing forms of religious life: trust. The superior trusts that the subjects desire to obey; the subjects trust that the superior wills their good. All trust that God provides the grace that is needed for their flourishing, and nobody has the kind of dismal and unchristian anthropology that suggests that human beings will only seek God if coerced into it against the call of their rotten nature. This kind of leadership, rooted in service and humility, is what we can expect from our Augustinian pope; we would do well to respond, in an equally Augustinian spirit, with an attitude of trust and mercy towards him.

I’ve had much cause to reflect on the Rule of Saint Augustine in the months since Pope Leo XIV was elected. The more I do so, the more I feel that Sister Julie did me a great favor back in the days when she sacrificed the cleanliness of my habit or the integrity of my fingernails for my growth in understanding of the common life. After all, external conformity of custom and behavior looks very impressive, and probably gets things done a lot quicker, but it means very little unless I am dwelling with my sisters in unity of heart and mind. And while I do not know the Holy Father’s views on how best to recharge a car battery, I know that he (and Augustine too) would agree with Sister Julie on this: All of us living by this Rule have been called by God to form such a unity, a graced communion of persons which images the very life of God itself.