Unitas, Caritas, Veritas: Understanding the Augustinian Spirituality of Pope Leo XIV

In the weeks since American Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV, he’s returned more than once to a few key concepts. “I would like our first great desire to be for a united church,” he said in the homily at his installation Mass, “a sign of unity and communion which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.” So, too, from the balcony at St. Peter’s, he called upon the church to “move forward…without fear, united hand in hand with God and with each other.”

“We want to be a synodal Church, a Church that walks together, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always tries to be close especially to those who suffer.”

These comments may seem like a natural extension of the work of Pope Francis. He’s certainly already made it clear that he, too, sees unity as not a matter of uniformity to some set of ideas or principles, but as the fruit of authentic conversation in which people speak honestly about their own experiences of God. “Unity does not cancel out differences,” he said at his installation Mass, “but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people.” Within this context, the role of the pope is not that of “an autocrat, lording it over those who are entrusted to him,” he preached, but rather companion and discerning listener: “He is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, to walk alongside them, for all of us are living stones called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion.” 

But as Augustinian father and Bronx native Father Arthur Purcaro, O.S.A., assistant vice president of Mission and Ministry at Villanova University, explained to me in an interview on Zoom, Leo’s ideas about unity, communion, and a reconciled peace are also fundamental to the Augustinian order of which Pope Leo is a part. And his election as pope is an opportunity for Augustinian spirituality to enrich the church and each of us.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you tell me a little bit about the founding of the Augustinian order? 

St. Augustine lived from 354-430 and the order was founded in 1256—a big gap. But there were people who followed the rule of Augustine from the time of Augustine. When he converted and left the job he had working for the emperor in Milan, he went back to North Africa and gathered a community around him, including his son—we don’t have that many religious founders who have their own child with them!—and his mother; principally his close friends and relatives. They joined their goods and shared from that to live together. 

In some ways it was a philosophical community, which is what he dreamed of before he converted. But it was more than that. From day one they referred to Acts of the Apostles chapter 2; they were of one mind, one heart entirely centered upon God, sharing their goods as the first Christians did. 

Because Augustine was looking for others who were interested, he visited different cities, including Hippo, where he was grabbed to become a priest. He said, “I don’t really want to do this, but if you want me to, I’ll call my community to be with me.” So he established a second community of lay people among whom there were a few who were ordained. And then when he became a bishop a few years later he established another community of men at the bishop’s house. 

So in his lifetime there were already three Augustinian communities of different styles—all lay people in one, mixed lay people and ordained in a second, and all ordained in the third.

But the church founded the order of St. Augustine. We are very lucky to have that. Augustinian communities were largely contemplative, living an eremitical style of life, and the church wanted these disparate groups to come together. The church said, we need you to come together and be mendicant in the cities, as the Dominicans and Franciscans were. Not isolated, not separated from the world. Be in the world, and work for a better world. 

So our foundation is through the church, and our spiritual foundation is Augustine, who was always building community. That’s who he was, and you’ll see it very much in Bob Prevost, Leo XIV, too, that idea of building bridges. This is our nature, to build bridges, to get people to come together.

Building bridges is challenging work, maybe moreso today.

I love telling people, when you think of Augustine, you probably think he had these lovely people around him. No. He had land owners and he had the serfs, the people who worked on the land. Everybody ate the same, at the same table. Most of the people in his original communities did not know how to read and write, and those who did had to put their gifts at the service of the community. 

Over the centuries have the Augustinians developed principles or practices for enabling community to move beyond differences? 

Definitely. In our constitutions the beginning is that everybody has human dignity. Nobody’s worth more and nobody’s worth less, and we all have something to offer. 

In his rule, Augustine writes, “Honor God in one another, whose temples you have become.” 

The rule is very short, just 8 chapters, but several times Augustine emphasizes the fact that God is in us, not just with us. We are part of God, God is part of us.

To say God is within us all seems like an even more radical affirmation than saying we’re all born in God’s image. And it suggests we’re all part of something together. 

One family, one planet, one common home, yeah. 

Laudato si’ paragraph 240 summarizes exactly what Christ, Acts of the Apostles, Augustine, and the Augustinians are about: We grow more, we mature more, we become more sanctified to the extent that we go out of ourselves to enter into communion with God, others, and nature. We are called to communion. And community is our way of living now in anticipation of the communion to which we are called.  

The challenge is to admire God in one another. We can love humanity and be stuck with the brothers we have to live with, but no, we have to love the brothers we live with and admire God in nature as well. 

For us Augustinians in Latin America, this comes so naturally. This is community life, listening to one another, creating structures for listening as well as speaking, saying our word but hearing the other’s. The Church in Latin America has been trying to create those structures since Vatican II recaptured for us what was in the church from the beginning, the synodality of coming together. We had Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo, Aparecida, these gatherings of bishops who had consulted with their people. We take that for granted. That’s just how church is. And now Francis has tried to make it part of the church universal. I think you’ll find it natural for Bob Prevost to continue that. 

What would you say are the fundamental principles of Augustinian spirituality? 

There are three basic principles. First, interiority: Augustine was always searching. He had a restless heart, and that’s one of our characteristics. We’re always searching for God, for who we’re challenged to be. We find God not just outside of us but also inside of us. 

And we’re searching together. It’s not my search that I share with you. No, we search together. 

That naturally leads into the second characteristic of Augustinian life, which is communion, community. We are community builders. That’s why we become Augustinians. We know we need one another, just as God needs us and we need God. When we share our search together, we build community, and a community of sharing: Authority is not at the top, it’s not a pyramid. We become a circle, a communion in which everyone has something to offer. 

Lastly, the third aspect: When we were called to be mendicants in the cities, it emphasized our service to the church, which Augustine also identified with. We were called to share our charism with the world. 

Interiority, building up community and being at the service of the church: Those are the elements which define the Augustinian order now. At Villanova University, the three words we use are Unitas, Caritas, and Veritas. Veritas is the search for truth. Caritas is our sharing what God has given us, the service. And Unitas is our community life. 

Unitas or communion sounds like it has a strong material, economic justice component. 

Some of the basic principles of Catholic social thought are essential to any Christian community, and we try to emphasize them in our Augustinian community: dignity, common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.

When Bob came out and said he’d chosen the name Leo, it was no surprise, but I was so glad. It’s what we are trying to do in the world—not just Augustinians, but Catholics, Christians. 

Jesuits today would point to some figures and events since Vatican II that have been formative of the order, people like superior generals Pedro Arrupe and Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, or John Paul II’s intervention in the order after Arrupe had his stroke. Are there figures or events in modern Augustinian history that similarly continue to impact the order? 

Not to the extent of Arrupe for the Jesuits, at least in my estimation. After Vatican II we did have an American prior general, Teddy Tack from the province of Chicago, who put emphasis on our community life, and helped us return to our charism of building community, which certainly influenced the whole order. 

There are other figures whose calls for holiness have been presented. In the stained glass windows at the Corr Chapel at Villanova, you’ll find people who are significant to Augustinians today—Dorothy Day; Oscar Romero; Thea Bowman. These are people who sing with their lives. They’ve enriched our vocation, called us to reach out and share what we have with other people and allow us to be shared with, to receive from the people.

There are two Augustinians I lived with up there, too. John McKniff was in Cuba for 29 years. The last nine years he was the only Augustinian not thrown out by Fidel Castro. John was in a parish in the center of Havana, and he established a school for the poor, opened a clinic. And so Fidel did not throw him out. 

I lived with him for 14 years in Peru. He was a person who lived to share his faith, and he did it through the Legion of Mary. Eighty-five percent of the people were illiterate, and here was a way of learning a little bit more about our faith through the decades of the rosary. It really worked. We established these comunidades ecclesia de base, basic Christian communities because we were able to establish neighborhoods centered on the faith. 

Another person is Bill Atkinson, who was three years ahead of me in the seminary. He went to the novitiate, had a toboggan accident, and became a quadriplegic. He was the first person to be ordained as a quadriplegic, by Cardinal Krol. The doctor had said with this type of accident, he’d live one or two years at most. But he lived 40 years after that in his wheelchair. He lived because the community looked after him. And he looked after the community. This is a basic Augustinian value. And so many people were influenced by his life because he listened to them, and was so down to earth and human. 

As we’ve been talking, your affection for the new pope is really clear. It’s really wonderful to talk to someone who actually knows him. 

I finished the semester at Villanova on the 24th of April and flew to Rome on the 25th. The 26th was my 50th anniversary to the priesthood, and I had plans to celebrate Mass that day with Bob. As it turned out, that was the pope’s funeral, and we did concelebrate and prayed for the pope.

A few days later my brother and his family came. I invited Bob to join us for dinner at a local restaurant. I had been on his general council for six years in Rome from 2001-2007, and we had our places where we would go. It’s not exactly Arthur Avenue, but nice local places. 

He said maybe he’d join us for dessert. But my brother and his family got tired during dinner, and we were on our way to leave. We stepped outside, where it was raining, and somebody bumbles in with a big umbrella. It was Bob. He said, “You ready for dessert?” 

That was our “Gelato Summit,” as my brother now calls it. And afterwards, here was the man who was going to be the pope, walking him back to his house, holding his umbrella over my brother’s head, not his own. That’s the type of guy Bob Prevost is. 

When he came out onto the balcony and he had on the red I thought, “That’s unusual.” Francis made it a point to not do the red trappings. But this is Bob. He’s not looking for the trappings. He’s reaching out. He wants people to see, there’s space here for everybody.