St Augustine and the Crisis of Silence: An Augustinian Appraisal of Pope Leo XIV

The pontificate of Pope Leo XIV began under the sign of high expectation. As the first pope to emerge from the Order of St Augustine, many anticipated a return to clarity, courage, and the fearless witness of the Doctor of Grace. His early pontificate was praised for Christ-centred preaching, personal humility, and a spirit of reconciliation. Yet recent events in Rome have raised grave concerns.

Audiences with dissenting figures, tolerance of scandalous displays, and a conspicuous silence where correction was urgently required have led some to fear that Leo’s pontificate risks becoming a continuation of Bergoglian compromise. Among the strongest voices of warning is Professor John Rist, one of the world’s leading Augustine scholars, who bluntly states that the saint would have been “appalled” at what has taken place.

The silence that scandalises
The controversies are not minor. In August, Leo XIV received Jesuit Fr. James Martin, the most prominent advocate of normalising homosexual behaviour in the Church. The priest publicly described the meeting as joyful and encouraging, with the Vatican offering no clarification of doctrine. Days earlier, Leo quietly met Dominican Sister Lucia Caram, who has defended abortion and same-sex “marriage” while casting doubt on the perpetual virginity of Mary. Again, no correction followed.

Meanwhile, over a thousand LGBT activists processed into St Peter’s Basilica under rainbow flags, wearing t-shirts mocking the Church’s moral law, as part of a Jubilee pilgrimage long known to the Vatican. Most recently, Leo appointed a “feminist queer” art historian to head the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts, despite her record of promoting nudity and sadomasochistic themes in exhibitions.

Each of these events would be troubling on its own. Taken together, and left uncorrected by the Pope, they create the impression not of pastoral patience but of silent approval.

Augustine’s intolerance for ambiguity
St Augustine lived in a world deeply corrupted by sexual licence. He knew from experience how attractive vice could be, but he also knew from grace how necessary clarity and conversion were. His Confessions call sodomy “foul offences which be against nature, to be everywhere and at all times detested and punished”¹. In City of God, he describes the destruction of Sodom as both judgment and warning, teaching that Lot’s wife was turned to salt to remind believers not to look back to sins once renounced².

Professor Rist emphasises that Augustine “had no time whatsoever for homosexual behaviour, common though it was in the world in which he lived.” To see an Augustinian pope tolerating such advocacy would, he argues, leave Augustine “astonished and disgusted.”

On abortion, Augustine is equally firm. While he wrestled with philosophical debates about ensoulment, he never wavered in condemning abortion as the destruction of human life, consistent with the earliest Christian witness of the Didache and Tertullian³. For a pope to warmly greet a religious who openly supports abortion without correction would, in Augustine’s eyes, be an abdication of episcopal duty.

The bishop’s duty to correct
Central to Augustine’s vision of the episcopate was the duty of correction. In his sermons to clergy, he repeatedly warned that a bishop who fails to admonish sinners becomes complicit in their sin. Preaching on the prophet Ezekiel’s watchman, Augustine declared: “The negligent shepherd does not say to the sinner, ‘You are perishing.’ And because he does not say it, the sinner perishes, but the shepherd is condemned with him”⁴.

For Augustine, charity is not silent accompaniment but truth spoken in love. To correct is to love; to fail to correct is to hate. This is why Rist insists Augustine would not interpret papal silence as prudence but as betrayal.

Original sin and the illusion of accompaniment
Rist further argues that the crisis of the modern Church stems from forgetting or ignoring original sin. Augustine’s doctrine of the Fall was not a pessimistic anthropology but a sober recognition that man’s will is wounded and must be healed by grace. To “accompany” sinners without calling them to conversion is, in Augustinian terms, to collude with the corruption of concupiscence.

Leo XIV, like his predecessor, often speaks of accompaniment. But without the Augustinian realism of original sin, accompaniment easily slips into permissiveness. Augustine’s insistence on the need for correction flows from this realism: sin cannot be flattered away, only redeemed through repentance and grace.

Fear of elites, not fear of God
Why this silence? Rist suggests that “progressive” attitudes often mask a deeper motive: fear of unpopularity among Western elites. Augustine knew such temptations well. In his day, bishops were tempted to court imperial favour or avoid persecution by compromise. Yet Augustine’s standard was unyielding: better to face unpopularity than betray Christ.

Rist recalls the example of St Basil, who refused a Roman official’s request to approve wickedness. When the official remarked that other bishops had agreed, Basil replied, “You have not yet met a real bishop.” Augustine would have echoed this, rebuking today’s hierarchy for servility in the face of cultural power.

The problem of Bergoglian continuity
The deeper context, Rist warns, is Bergoglianism: the ambiguities and innovations of Pope Francis, which were rarely corrected by bishops and now risk being institutionalised under Leo XIV. With two-thirds of the College of Cardinals appointed by Francis, the election of an Augustinian pope was unlikely to produce a rupture. Yet continuity with error is no virtue.

Here Augustine’s teaching again cuts to the heart. He warned against heretics who cloaked error in the language of peace, saying, “For they say, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace”⁵. A false irenicism is not unity but betrayal.

Modernism and the Augustinian warning
The crisis is not new. Over a century ago, Pope St Pius X diagnosed modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907)⁶. He warned that modernists, under the guise of pastoral concern, replace eternal truth with evolving sentiment. The pattern described by Pius X is visible again today: ambiguous words, scandalous actions, and silence that allows error to flourish unchecked.

Pius X’s solution was clear: “There is only one course to be taken: to wage a relentless war against modernism.” In this light, Augustine’s insistence on correction and clarity appears as the perennial antidote to the disease of doctrinal relativism.

The Kingship of Christ against false peace
Another warning comes from Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925). He taught that true peace can only come through the social reign of Christ the King, not through compromise with the world. “If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to Christ.”⁷ By analogy, bishops who seek peace by flattering elites, rather than by fidelity to Christ, build only a false peace that will collapse into scandal.

Augustine anticipated this truth in City of God, contrasting the earthly city, built on self-love even to the point of contempt for God, with the heavenly city, built on the love of God even to the contempt of self. The attempt to make peace with the earthly city through silence about sin is, for Augustine, to betray the heavenly city.

Conclusion: The Augustinian challenge to Leo XIV
The crisis of silence at the Vatican is not merely administrative. It touches the essence of pastoral responsibility. Augustine taught that shepherds will be judged not only for their own sins but for the souls they failed to warn. His voice, echoing across sixteen centuries, calls today’s Church to rediscover the courage of correction.

For Pope Leo XIV, the challenge is acute. Will he, as the first Augustinian pope, embody the fearless witness of his spiritual father? Or will he allow Bergoglian ambiguity and silence to persist? The answer will shape not only his pontificate but the future of Catholic witness in an age of moral confusion.

In the words of Pius X, the Church must once again “restore all things in Christ.” Augustine would add: woe to the shepherds who remain silent, for their silence betrays not only doctrine but souls.

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Footnotes

1. Augustine, Confessions, Book III, Ch. 8.
2. Augustine, City of God, Book XVI, Ch. 30.
3. Cf. Didache, Ch. 2; Tertullian, Apology, Ch. 9.
4. Augustine, Sermon 46 on Pastors, citing Ezekiel 33:7-9.
5. Augustine, City of God, Book XIX, Ch. 11.
6. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, §39.
7. Pius XI, Quas Primas, §19.