The new pope, Leo XIV, has spent most of his life as a friar in the Order of St. Augustine, a religious community in the Roman Catholic Church. His experience of joining, serving and leading that institution could shape his approach to the papacy.
Experts said that a commitment to two elements of Augustinian teaching — missionary outreach and listening widely before taking decisions — would most likely have a particular influence, just as Pope Francis’ identity as a Jesuit guided his papacy. Leo used his first Mass as pope on Friday to call for “missionary outreach,” possibly an early sign of the order’s influence on him.
The pope, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, grew up in the Chicago area. He attended a boarding school for boys near the city of Holland, Mich., that was run by the Augustinians. The school has since closed.
In 1977, he graduated from Villanova University, the premier Catholic university of the Augustinian order in the United States. That year, he entered the novitiate of the Order of St. Augustine in St. Louis. Four years later, at age 25, he made his vows to join the order, according to Vatican News, the Holy See’s news service.
The decision to join an order rather than become a priest in a diocese is crucial to understanding Leo’s approach to a life of faith, according to Sister Gemma Simmonds, an author and senior research fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology at Cambridge University.
A diocesan priest is charged with obedience to his bishop but is otherwise largely independent, she said, while a member of an order makes a commitment to live, pray, eat, worship and make decisions in community.
“The emphasis is on collaboration and community life,” said Sister Gemma, who belongs to the Congregation of Jesus, another Catholic religious order. “That’s very interesting for a pope, because it means that he is geared toward collaborative decision making.”
The Order of St. Augustine, one of many within the Catholic Church, has its own distinct character. It was founded in 1244, when Pope Innocent IV united groups of hermits in service to the church as a community of friars. The group committed to a lifestyle of poverty, and a mix of contemplation and pastoral service.
Augustinians look to one of Christianity’s most important early theologians, Aurelius Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who was born in what is now Algeria in the fourth century. Augustine is perhaps most famous for an autobiographical work called “Confessions,” which in part details his conversion to Christianity after an immoral youth.
He also wrote a guide to religious life, known as a rule, which is the cornerstone of the Augustinian order. It commits its members to “live together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God.”
The order is divided into three branches — friars, nuns and lay members — and has a presence in around 50 countries, most notably in Latin America, according to its website, augustinians.org. Leo led the Augustinians, as Prior General, from 2001 to 2013.
On Thursday, the Augustinians welcomed the new pope’s election and said it would “renew our commitment as Augustinians to serve the Church in its mission.”
That mission, especially in Peru, defined the new pope’s career. As a priest, he first went to the country in 1985, working at the Augustinian mission in the northwestern town of Chulucanas. Over the following years, he moved into more senior roles at the Augustinian mission in the city of Trujillo, where he was also a professor of canon law and theology.
In those years, the country was plagued by violence fomented by the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla movement.
The legacy of some Christian missionary work has attracted criticism, not least in Latin America where over the centuries it helped promote conquest and colonization. While the church has wrestled with that legacy, the concept of mission, in the sense of reaching beyond the institution’s walls into communities that are often impoverished, retains a powerful hold on Catholic thinking.
John Allen, a veteran Vatican analyst, said that Leo’s experience as a missionary was likely part of what attracted the cardinals to him in the papal conclave.
“One of the things he did is to insist that the leadership of the mission becomes indigenous,” Mr. Allen said in an interview. “That reflects the heart of a missionary, and I think that is what the cardinals saw.”
