It is not every day that a priest can say he knew the Pope before he was famous, but Fr Brian Buckley OSA can.
Fr Buckley is the prior at St Joseph’s Parish in South Yarra, the centre of Victoria’s only Augustinian community. He remembers how the world’s first Augustinian Pope, then Fr Robert Prevost OSA, visited Australia several times in his former role as prior general for the Augustinians, the leader of the order worldwide from 2001 to 2014. Fr Buckley met him many times, in Melbourne and Sydney, in Rome and often in South Korea, where Fr Buckley served for 30 years.
A very calm, a very reassuring presence and style of leadership.
‘Because he was our major superior—he was our prior general worldwide—he obviously visited all our communities around the world,’ Fr Buckley says, adding that some South Yarra parishioners would remember Fr Prevost’s visit to the parish in 2005. ‘We did find a small piece in the parish weekly bulletin about his visit in 2005, but we haven’t been able to locate any pictures ... people didn’t have the ubiquitous cell phones at that time!’
Fr Buckley remembers Pope Leo XIV as a conscientious, meticulous person, with a ‘very calm, a very reassuring presence and style of leadership’. Watching the new pope on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in the hours after his election, Fr Buckley supposed he would have been churning inside at the responsibility of being elevated to the Catholic Church’s highest position but was impressed by his peaceful bearing.
He says the new pope is likely to balance the work of Pope Francis with his own measured approach, playing, ‘as he said quite a few times in his initial address, that role as a bridge builder. I’d never been in the presence of Pope Francis, [but he] exhibited a little bit more of the Latin spontaneity. Bob, or Robert, probably is a little bit more reserved. [His papacy] would not have quite the same Latin verve of Pope Francis, I would think.’
In his first formal speech to the College of Cardinals on Saturday 10 May, Pope Leo XIV said there would be continuity with his immediate predecessors’ ministries but that he sensed he had been called to continue on the same path as Leo XIII, which was partly why he chose the same name. ‘Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical (Rerum novarum), addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,’ the Pope said. His work would respond ‘to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.’
[Pope Leo XIII] was by any measure the second founder of the Augustinians, and in that sense, our new pontiff’s choice of his name is entirely appropriate and a fitting tribute.
Fr Buckley says he was struck by the significance of the Pope’s chosen name, Leo, not just because of the earlier pope’s commitment to the Church’s social teaching. ‘For me there is another poignant and compelling reason for the appropriateness of that choice. Our Order … was saved from almost certain obscurity by the intervention of the same Leo XIII.’
Although not Augustinian himself, Leo XIII came from a rural Augustinian parish in Italy. ‘On assuming the papacy [in 1878], he continued to favour and support the “rump” of the congregation, reduced as it was to a few hundred Spanish-speaking friars, to again flourish and thrive throughout the century that followed. He bestowed benefices, entrusted us with significant ministries, raised up cardinals from among our members and canonised our saints and blessed,’ Fr Buckley says. ‘He was by any measure the second founder of the Augustinians, and in that sense, our new pontiff’s choice of his name is entirely appropriate and a fitting tribute.’
The Augustinian order has a small presence in Australia—and only three priests at South Yarra—but there are historically significant Augustinian figures in Australia’s post-settlement past. Fr Buckley points to the first Archbishop of Melbourne, James Alipius Goold, an ordained Augustinian priest who came to Australia from Ireland as a missionary in the 1830s, before his elevation in 1848.
Fr Buckley says the spirit of St Augustine is already imbued in Pope Leo XIV’s ministry. For example, the Pope’s first homily was ‘bristling with images and references to the writings and spirituality of that great figure’.
I cannot say that the shock of the election of Leo XIV has passed. I feel rather the full impact of that shock wave is still to peak.
Pope Leo XIV said God has entrusted this papacy to him ‘so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the Church. He has done so in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a hill, an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world.’
The theme, says Fr Buckley, is central to Augustinian ecclesiology: Christ as head of the Church; ‘a city set on a hill’, referring to St Augustine’s masterwork The City of God; the Church as an ‘ark of salvation’, recalling the great saint’s frequent exhortation to trust in Jesus; and the ‘beacon’ as St Augustine’s idea of the ‘divine light of Christ’.
‘I cannot say that the shock of the election of Leo XIV has passed. I feel rather the full impact of that shock wave is still to peak,’ Fr Buckley says. ‘I sense a particular significance and providence in our Holy Father being [St Augustine’s] spiritual successor.’
Banner image: Pope Leo XIV, then Fr Robert Prevost, Prior General of the Augustinian Order, celebrating Mass on Collaroy beach in Sydney during a visit to Australia. (Photo courtesy of the Catholic Community of North Harbour NSW.)
