J.D. and Pope Leo
The battle over Augustine’s ‘Restless Heart’
For a brief moment last month, J.D. Vance was Rome’s most high-profile follower of Augustine.
The way Vance tells it, when it came to religious belief he stumbled through the early parts of his life, until, in his mid-30s, he discovered St. Augustine. “There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the church believes,” Vance said when he converted to Catholicism six years ago.
Later, Vance said that Augustine’s examinations of decadence and the lust for domination were “the best critique of our modern age I’ve ever read.”
Before becoming U.S. vice-president, the Ohio-born Vance was best known as the author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He came to Rome for Easter, where fate determined he would be the last person to meet publicly with Pope Francis, just 20 hours before the pontiff died.
Eighteen days later, the church reeling from Francis’ passing, the world met former Cardinal Robert Prevost – like Vance, a midwesterner -- who became Pope Leo XIV. A former head of the Religious Order of St. Augustine, Leo is the first Augustinian pontiff, and, likely, the most prominent Augustinian in five centuries.
Lustful youth
The Basilica of St. Augustine in Rome is a good place to think about Augustine.
The 15th-century basilica is a literal two-minute walk from bustling, tourist-heavy Piazza Navona. But on a random recent afternoon at the start of high season there were fewer than two dozen visitors to the under-appreciated basilica, and the ones who were there were clustered around Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto near the front. In other words, visitors can all but have the place to themselves.
I was introduced to Augustine as a university student, when I read his memoir, Confessions, which detailed the author’s troubled and lustful youth and his redemption -- like a spiritual forerunner to Jean Valjean from Les Misérables.
But I also knew I’d quickly get out of my depth when it came to Augustinian philosophy, so I called John Cavadini from the University of Notre Dame, who is among the world’s most respected scholars when it came to the fourth- and fifth-century theologian.
“The first thing to understand is the Rule of St. Augustine,” Cavadini said, referring to a set of principles followers should strive for, including charity, humility, moderation, and care for the sick and the weak.
“You could say Augustine was an anti-perfectionist in the sense that he doesn’t believe any Christian living this life can claim perfection,” the professor said. “We’re supposed to strive for it and grow in holiness, but the belief is that all Christian life is one, continuing conversion. He knew that we can’t be so harsh as to expect perfection … he said we must have patience and deal with imperfection. That’s a very good combination for a bishop and a pope.”
The “Order of love” and the politics of charity
Writing as the Roman Empire crumbled around him, Augustine watched as many panicked Romans blamed Christianity for the decline. Augustine argued that no earthly power could replace religious faith. I don’t claim to be even an amateur theologian, but I think both Pope Leo and Vance must draw from this in their roles.
Though Vance and Pope Leo have never met, they have directly clashed over what had been an obscure theological concept called Ordo amoris -- Latin for “Order of love.” The notion that most scholars see as about charity rather than exclusion has its roots with St. Augustine.
But Vance has invoked the concept to help justify the Donald Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants and asylum seekers in the U.S. and the rollbacks on U.S. foreign aid.
“It’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said in February.
Soon after, then-Cardinal Prevost used social media to rebut the interpretation, “J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” The response earned scores of headlines, especially after Prevost was elevated to the papacy.
When I asked him about the controversy surrounding the exchange, Cavadini, the professor, spoke deliberately.
“I admire the fact that [Vance] read St. Augustine, and that he obviously sensed a certain richness in what he read,” Cavadini said. “I’m not going to hold him to the same standard I would use for the pope, who has studied all these years and who knows Augustine very well.”
He paused.
“You have to go through this stuff systematically, and you have to go through it with a guide.” Cavadini sighed.
“I wish he’d just come to my classes.”
Post-scriptum:
One Friday afternoon in 2002, I was in a Roman bar watching the U.S. soccer team holding Germany to a standstill in the World Cup. Half an hour in, the game was still a scoreless tie. It was the world’s biggest sporting event, and the winner of the game would earn a spot in the last four.
There was a smattering of American and German fans there, but the loudest voices belonged to the locals. The Italian team had been eliminated the week before, and their fans all seemed to be cheering for the passionate Americans against the disciplined and methodical Germans.
I felt a swell of national pride.
At one point, the German goalkeeper barely deflected a strong U.S. shot and the whole bar groaned. I looked around and thought, You know, we might really win this thing. Then a chill ran down my spine. Oh no, we might really win this thing.
Remember the context: At the time of the game, the U.S. was gearing up to invade Iraq behind what we now know were dubious claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction. Only a few months earlier, President George W. Bush -- already deeply unpopular abroad -- coined the comic-book-sounding term “Axis of Evil.” Thanks to the U.S., everyone by then had to take their shoes off at airport security.
There was already a rising tide of international resentment against my home country. How would they feel if the U.S. suddenly excelled in a field where it had never been taken seriously, where is was an afterthought?
I had the same chill more than 20 years later, when Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV was introduced. St. Peter’s Square erupted into cheers and applause. Today, the U.S. global image is even more damaged than it was in 2002. Will some of that stigma rub off on Pope Leo?
To be sure, the new pontiff has expertly navigated the first days since his election. He’s so far defied efforts to pigeonhole him as liberal or conservative, and he’s cast himself as a pope who happens to be American rather than as an American pope.
Even before Monday’s ceremony when he blessed me and the other journalists who covered the conclave, I felt a strong affinity for him: he’d lived almost all his life in the U.S., Peru, and Italy -- the three countries where I’ve lived almost all my life.
But the pontiff has many prickly challenges to address, from clergy sex scandals to Vatican financial misdeeds, and from polarizing issues related to gender and sexuality to the increasing partisan divide even among the faithful.
Germany ultimately prevailed 1-0, in the soccer game and my fears of a backlash faded. But this time around, the stakes are higher.
Don't forget that in addition to J.D. Vance and Pope Leo XIV, that St. Augustine had a big influence on Martin Luther and John Calvin.
There's a lot here. That same World Cup I watched S. Korea hammer gli Azzurri, and the crowd at the bar on Via Innocenzo X first fell silent then broke into sounds of rage and tears. Then Perugia cut the S. Korean star a week later. When I first heard about the election, my first thought was that JD had so irritated the Vatican crowd that that their hopes turned to an alternative American POV. But who knows. As with JD, Augustine's conversion mania led him down some questionable dark alleys. And may be like Augustine, JD will find that his followers will show selective fealty and ignore the stuffed shirt's claims to authority when he does not kowtow to their own manic whimsy.