Dear friends,
Today’s Scripture reflection is about St. Augustine, whose feast the Church keeps today, and about the two men who claim their heritage from him: the one who marched on Washington for civil rights, jobs, and justice on his feast day in 1963, and the one who claimed the North African saint as his own from the loggia of St. Peter’s on the day of his election, May 8, 2025.
These Scripture reflections are available exclusively to paid subscribers. If my work means something to you, I’m asking for your help.
If you’d like to invest in our mission during this critical time, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Whether you give $0, $1, $100, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
“Stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” — Matthew 25:13
Monica’s memorial fell yesterday, and her son’s feast is today.
The calendar runs mother first, and I have come to think the arrangement is making an argument (a quiet one, the kind the Church is good at) about who the real protagonist of this story is. Two Americans who claimed Augustine as their own, a Baptist preacher from Atlanta and a pope from the South Side of Chicago, were made the same way he was: by a mother who would not quit.
The way we too often tell it, Augustine is a one-man show.
A brilliant kid from Thagaste, a small town in what is now Algeria, chases a rhetoric career through Carthage and then Milan; keeps a mistress for fifteen years, who bears him a son they name Adeodatus; drifts through the Manichaean sect and then the fashionable skepticism of the philosophy schools; prays, somewhere in there, the most honest prayer in Christian literature, “give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
Then, in a garden in Milan in the late summer of 386, he hears a child next door chanting “take up and read,” opens Paul’s letter to the Romans at random, and his life turns. Back home in Africa he becomes bishop of Hippo, writes the Confessions and the City of God, and dies in 430 with the Vandals outside the walls.
Sixteen centuries later a pope from Chicago stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s and introduced himself, in his first words to the world, as “a son of Saint Augustine.”
In that version, Monica is scenery. The weeping mother, somewhere behind the genius. It is the same place we keep Alberta Williams King, the organist at Ebenezer Baptist who raised the preacher, and Mildred Prevost, the librarian on Chicago’s South Side who raised the pope.
But that isn’t true at all. Here’s the reality.
Those women were the engines behind their son’s legacies.
