Pope Leo’s desire for ‘flatmates’ offers a valuable lesson to all Catholics

Jesus promised believers that they would experience a fountain of Living Water welling up in them, giving eternal life, and the Holy Spirit has ever since being filling the Catholic Church with a wide variety of reservoirs to hold that Living Water in different configurations of spirituality.

As Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Ratzinger brought his Benedictine roots to the papacy. As a Jesuit himself, Pope Francis brought the charisms of the Society of Jesus, while Pope Leo XIV has brought the priorities of the Augustinians.

Shy and retiring Pope Benedict surrounded himself with members of Memores Domini, consecrated lay women who ran his household. He also had the help and encouragement of his secretary, Fr Stanislaw Dziwisz (later Archbishop of Crakow), and followed by, Msgr. Georg Genswein, who also acted as his personal secretary.

Pope Francis was something of a networker. He wanted to know what was going on. He was ill at ease when isolated from people, and felt he could keep his finger on the pulse by living in Casa Santa Martha, where he rotated secretaries, and was able to network, giving and receiving information more effectively.

Pope Leo, in contrast, has moved back into the papal apartments, to the great relief of many people who found their emptiness symbolically upsetting. Before Pope Francis, there used to be a light in the window each night – but which then went out.

With the election of Pope Leo XIV, the light has been restored. But, even more, the news has been announced that the new Pope is bringing with him some of hisAugustinian community to live with him.

As Cardinal Prevost, he formerly lived in the Augustinianum, near the Vatican, where he observed the strictly routine of prayer, Mass and shared meals. If he had to be absent he would notify the superior.

St Augustine of Hippo’s spirituality was deeply marked by the need to live in community.

One of the first steps he made after his conversion was to form a small community of friends and family living together in a villa in Cassiciacum near Milan (386-7). Their life was shaped by talking philosophy, prayer and shared meals.

After his baptism, he went back to north Africa, to Thagaste, and immediately formed a lay community with friends, celebrating poverty, chastity and shared purposes. He called it “Servants of God”, and the point of it was to help them all to live simply, read the Scriptures and support each other as they deepened their spiritual roots (Letter 10).

In Hippo, as a priest (391) and as a bishop (395), he followed the same model, living with his priests in a shared household. This monisterium clericorum helped him face the temptations of pride and isolation.

The Augustinian rule which he drew up in 397 emphasised some simple but essential aspects of living in community.  His strategy was shaped by his theological view of human nature, with its dual need and capacity for love versus its corrupting tendency to selfishness. His experience of living in community shaped his writing of his City of God (marked by love and commitment to others) compared with the earthly city (marked by self-love.)

When I was in the process of preparing a lecture on St Thomas Becket at Canterbury a few weeks ago, I re-read the history of Christianity in Kent for the centuries following St Augustine of Canterbury. I was reminded with fresh eyes of the fact that the deepest impact on the surrounding pagan culture was made by the sheer intensity, integrity and depth of monks and monastic communities.

It’s no accident that the psychopathic progenitor of the Protestant experiment, Henry VIII, made the rape and pillaging of the monasteries his opening move, leaving a scar on the national psyche that has never yet been healed. The monasteries were (while their ruins are) so deeply emblematic of the Catholic spirit they – they had (have) symbolic but also potently pragmatic power in both the social and the metaphysical world.

People often overlook that fact that in medieval Europe it was the Catholic Church that founded social care with hospices, hospitals, schools, the feeding of the local poor and finally – and with astonishing effect – the universities.  

Peter Ackroyd, the English historian, in noting that something like 90 per cent of the world’s ghost stories are found in English literature, offers the explantation that the crushing of the monasteries also had a terrible impact on the long-established English relationship of being able to pray for the dead.

The suppression of our monasteries interrupted a profound sense of communal belonging across space and time, between the generations. Consequently a profound neurosis entered the collective English soul which erupted in the sterile preoccupation with ghosts and ghost stories.

As we contemplate the need to re-evangelise Europe, it may be that it can only be done, as it was in the first years, by muscular monks and strategic monastic communities modelling a way of life that was richer, deeper, more benign and more blessed than a surrounding culture, red in tooth and claw.

As the de-humanising aridity and ever more violent and sexualised natures of secularism suffocates the remaining good at the end of Christendom, the recognition of the need for Christians to live in community is resurfacing.

In Rod Dreher’s much misunderstood and often carelessly pilloried Benedict Option he suggests that personal and communal faith can be safeguarded by Christians thinking more strategically about how they live in proximity with one another.

There is of course a scale of shared living that ranges from living in a recognised ecclesial community with a rule, to living in a the same area of a town or city in order to provide a form of critical mass of Catholics, so that there are Catholics lawyers, doctors, architects, nurses, teachers, accountants, etc., who form a substantial and therefore more influential body of people in an area.

This is of course already happening. In France, Catholics are gathering together to live in market towns where they can have some influence on the local politics and local civic policies. At a less organised level in England, small groups of Catholics friends are moving to the same areas of the country in order to move from solidarity to creating a critical mass.

The list of monastic and other orders that the Catholic Church has given rise to represents a heroic role call in holiness, discipline, dedication and prayer. Bénédictines, Cistercians, Carthusians, Canon regular of StAugustine, Brazilians (from the Eastern Catholic tradition) as well as the mendicant orders like the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Jesuits, Salesians and Redemptorists all bring their distinct spirituality, charisma and devotions.

In the renewal of the struggle to deepen Catholic life, prayer, spirituality and witness, it is encouraging to discover the Pope’s determination to live in community and bring Augustinian spirituality to the heart and apex of the Catholic Church, beginning with the papal apartments.

RELATED: Pope Leo to share papal apartments with ‘flatmates’

‍