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Meet Augustine, Pope Leo XIV’s Favorite Saint
He’s a saint you should know too
In the days since Cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, we’ve learned that his favorite sport is tennis and (after some initial confusion) that the Chicago native is a Chicago White Sox fan. Both of those things took reporters a little time to dig up, but one thing that he’s made no secret of is his favorite saint: St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the four Latin Fathers of the Church. And it goes back a long way; he chose St. Augustine Seminary as his high school.
If you’ve been paying attention over the past week, none of this is news to you. Pope Leo’s first trip outside of Rome after his election was to the Augustinian Sanctuary of the Mother of Good Counsel in Genazzano, and earlier today he made a surprise lunchtime visit to the Augustinianum, the headquarters of the Augustinian Order in Rome. And in nearly every public speech or homily since his election he has managed to work in some type of reference to St. Augustine more often than I slip in references to “Born to Run.” Given this, it’s only fitting that we all learn a little more about the saint we’ll be hearing about constantly in the years to come.
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a city in the Roman province of Numidia (present day Souk Ahras, Algeria). It will surprise some today that…
