The Church Is a Mixed Body: Pope Leo XIV’s Augustinian Holiness in a Violent World
Since the election of Pope Leo XIV, an Augustinian, there has been a happy increase in references to the thought of St. Augustine in papal preaching and teaching. As an avid reader of this fifth-century doctor of the Church (my doctoral work was based on a close reading of Augustine’s sermons), I see this development as something praiseworthy for the life of the Church today.
Why? St. Augustine, it should be remembered, lived in a polarized and violent time. When he became bishop of the Diocese of Hippo (in present-day Algeria), Catholics were in the minority. The majority group, the Donatists, argued that the true Church was found only in those who did not succumb to earlier persecutions. For this reason, Catholic sacraments were considered invalid. If you wanted to be a real Chrisitan, you needed to be Donatist. Underlying this assumption was a desire for a pure church, consisting exclusively of saints rather than sinners. Augustine spent much of his episcopate ministering, teaching, and arguing against Donatism, while inspiring the lay faithful in Hippo to, in fact, become holy.
In addition, one of Augustine’s most famous works is The City of God, finished in 426. This work responded to the claim of Roman pagans who saw Christians as responsible for the 410 sacking of Rome. Why? Because Christians abandoned the worship of the pagan gods, these gods have abandoned Rome. Augustine’s response to this charge was a blistering diagnosis of Rome’s ultimate sin: the lust for domination (libido dominandi). This lust was Rome’s eventual downfall, not Christians’ worship of the triune God. The second half of The City of God presents a history of two cities—the city of God and the city of man. For Augustine, since we remain on pilgrimage, it is impossible to easily distinguish the two cities. For the God who created the world has never abandoned us even in our disordered lust for domination, bringing light into the darkness.
In the present moment, St. Augustine’s teaching is a healing one. After all, the Church today seems stuck in a Donatist revival. In the public square of the internet, especially on social media, Catholics (at least internet celebrities) are regularly distinguishing between “real” and “fake” Catholics. This politician or public figure, I have often heard, is a Catholic in name only. The Church, in this vision, ceases to function as a mixed body (in Augustine’s Latin, corpus permixtum) of sinners and saints on the way to redemption. Instead, my party of the Church, whatever that party is, is the truly redeemed. This attitude leads to a distancing from the gift of the sacraments, the sharing in Christ’s life that is not a result of my own commitment to a series of principles but initiation into Christ’s Body, the Church. Donatism destroys Church life.
At the same time, the discourse of the online world does not stay on one’s social media platform. In concrete places around the globe, people are killing one another. Raging wars, assassinations at political rallies, and the hatred of our neighbor for whatever ails us. We are experiencing as the body politic: you could certainly read the signs of our time and conclude that the only reasonable option is to abandon this age. If the world is becoming more secular, if the Christian consensus of the 1950s in the United States has passed, well, let the city of man self-destruct, while the city of God waits for our eventual victory. Or you might come to the opposite conclusion—since this is an apocalyptic moment, we must respond ourselves to fight for the city of God.
The gift of Augustinian thought is that it provides a way of responding to these two problems—first, the secret Donatism of modern Church life and the lust for domination that still cuts through the darkness of the modern human heart. First, the problem of this secret Donatism is that it presumes that “I” am a member of the pure. It’s those ones, the weak Christians, who are really at fault. If they disappeared, then the Church would flourish. Augustine’s vision of the human being cuts against this prideful account of the self.
In his Confessions, Augustine begins by noting that God has created every human being for worship. The famous reference to our restless hearts which long for God, mentioned at the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions, is something that every Christian has probably heard about on a retreat or in a homily. But, equally important for Augustine, every human being is tempted to worship something that is not God. In his Confessions, the recently ordained bishop of Hippo tells his readers about his prideful past. You have probably heard the basic story. Augustine was born in a backwater town, his parents wanted him to become an important person in Roman society, he abandoned the lax Christianity of his youth, took up with a woman who was not his wife, experienced a conversion to the seeking of wisdom, and eventually abandoned his common life wife for a more socially advantageous match. Still, he had not found the happy life. At last, in his early thirties, Augustine finally lets the voice of God in his life, turning away from the worship of power and prestige for the self-emptying love of the Word who became flesh. He found delight now not in his own rhetoric but in the sweet words of the Psalms, which remind him of his true vocation: praise.
But in Book X, he takes up the story in the present moment. Here, if I were Augustine, I would be tempted to tell my audience that, yes, while I was formally a sinner, now I am doing pretty well. After all, I am a bishop! But Augustine does not take that approach. He tells his audience that he is still a sinner. He is still radically incomplete. The heart is restless until it rests in God. And complete rest in God is promised only at the end, not in the present.
In that sense, belonging to the Church is not finding a party of the pure, who are perfect just like us. Instead, it is being inserted in Christ’s very Body, the whole Christ (in Latin totus Christus)—head and members. The only one who is totally holy is the head, Jesus Christ. As members, the rest of us are on the way. I do not get to draw a line between the “real” disciple and the “fake” disciple. Instead, I am a sinner among sinners who is called to pursue holiness as a member of this mixed body. At every Mass, despite the persistent temptation on my part to blame other people, I do not say that it is your fault, your fault, your most grievous fault. I say that it is my fault, relying upon the holiness of Christ to heal me of my disordered loves in, with, and through the communion of the church.
The mixed body of the Church extends into our engagement with the political sphere. Whatever the politics of the moment, we must remember that in every human heart and political institution, the lust for domination persists. The Church, then, can never confuse this or that political party as representing the ideal incarnation of Christ’s merciful love. Every Christian is called, like Augustine, to preach (and therefore listen) to uncomfortable truths to a city that too often worships power and prestige instead of the self-emptying love of God. A pope, for example, who preaches peace when the polis would prefer some sort of religious elevation of the dogs of war, is a sign of a Church that understands her vocation in this city.
But if we are ultimately Augustinian in our outlook, we must recognize that sometimes the Church and her members will, at face value, lose. After all, the goal of the Church’s engagement in the city is fidelity to the head, Jesus Christ. It is not power, or fame, or fortune. Augustine found in the martyrs of early Christianity, of which there were many in Carthage in North Africa, icons of self-giving love unto the end. In his City of God, he wonders at one stage if these martyrs will be restored to their earthly glory at the resurrection of the dead. The headless will have their heads returned. Augustine allows this possibility, but he notes that the transformation will never leave behind the evidence of the love shown by these martyrs. What seems like defeat, the hidden way of love, is always a victory for Christ.
In that sense, the response of a Christian in a polarized Church and a world grown drunk on violence is faithful witness to God’s merciful love. Love of the God who created us, redeems us, and sanctifies us in the present. Love of the neighbor whom this God has put into my life to serve.
For Augustine, both acts—love of God and neighbor—are ultimately the true worship of the Christian. Such holiness is not reserved for some special class of intellectuals (those with college degrees, who are climbing the rankings of the U.S. News World Report) but rather is accessible to everyone who bends the knee before the God who made us to rest in him. To learn holiness from Augustine, therefore, might mean turning away from the spectacles presently unfolding in the halls of ecclesial and political power (who is going to be named the next Cardinal of this important U.S. diocese, or who is going to be the next president) and turn toward your ordinary parish where Christ’s hidden transformation of the world is underway.
After all, Pope Leo—the most famous Augustinian since Martin Luther—has this as his motto: In illo Uno unum (in the One, we are one). Who is the One, but Jesus Christ—the Word made flesh, who draws us to himself. Unity in the Church and therefore the world will be achieved most fully insofar as the Church remembers her Eucharistic vocation, the sense that she becomes fully who she is meant to be when she gathers around the altar. All human beings—no matter what nation of the world—is called to this Supper of the Lamb, and from this reception of Love, to create local cultures defined not by the lust for domination but the Eucharistic logic of the civitas Dei.
