Pope Leo XIV's Augustinian background gives him an interesting

perspective on Ireland - and a Maynooth-connected Servant of God

The prospect of a visit to Maynooth and its colleges by Pope Leo XIV is not on the radar as yet, and may never be over an extended papacy well into the 2030s in an uncertain future for the institutions. And so they may have to be satisfied with the official visit of Pope John Paul in 1979, though there were more intimate engagements on visits by future Popes - Giovanni Montini, then Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, in 1961 and Josef Ratzinger in 1969, as well as by recent papabile Gerhard Muller in 1974 (as a young priest) and 2014 and Luis Tagle for Peter Sutherland's Trocaire lecture in 2017 (he delivered his own Trocaire lecture online in 2021 due to Covid).

But the new Pope's Augustinian background gives him a unique place in an order that has strong Irish roots and equally strong American ones. It was Irish Augustinians who answered the call to establish the Augustinian presence in North America at about the time that Maynooth College was founded. After an unpromising few decades, during which it added only two new recruits there, it was Irish Augustinians who established the institution that became The University of St. Thomas at Villanova in Pennsylvania. Irish-born members of the order dominated the early years of the institution and the fledgling province, that grew into the wider U.S. network of which Robert Prevost's Midwest Province has long been an integral part. 

He was first however a typical American university student who enrolled at Villanova at the age of nineteen, following four years of high school at an Augustinian juniorate in Michigan, to study mathematics, graduating with a B.Sc. in 1977. He had by then absorbed the Augustinian ethos and continued to the order's novitiate in the same year.

Though by his era the native Irish influence had been largely lost, Irish-descended priests still featured widely in the order's educational, parochial and missionary activities, and two Midwest Province colleagues of the future Pope who laboured as bishops on the Peruvian mission were of Irish extraction (incidentally, a native Irish bishop also presided over a Peruvian see in recent times: the impressively-named William Dermott Molloy McDermott, a Dublin-born cleric educated at St Patrick's College Carlow and originally ordained for a U.S. diocese, was Bishop of Huancavelica from 1982 to his retirement in 2005; he died in 2013).

In 1983, the first year of Fr. Prevost's life as a priest, when he had arrived in Rome to begin his postgraduate studies*, the order elected an Irishman, Fr. Martin Nolan, as Superior General of its worldwide mission for a six-year term, a position from which he supervised the order's expansion in Peru, where Fr. Prevost served initially (with one short break) from 1985 to 1999. 

In 2002 Fr. Prevost, at the age of forty-seven and after serving as head of his own Midwest Province in the United States, would succeed to the position of Superior General vacated by Fr. Nolan thirteen years earlier (Fr. Nolan died in retirement in Ireland in 2018 at the age of eighty-five). During his tenure as Superior General, the future Pope visited Irish houses of his order, being famously remembered for trying on one occasion to obtain a mobile signal while standing at the top of a stairs.

Four years into Fr. Prevost's term, the death occurred of one of the order's most remarkable members in the United States. Fr. Bill Atkinson had been ordained in 1974 for the eastern province based in Villanova after an accident nine years earlier, when he was an Augustinian novice, which left him almost totally paralysed from the neck down. Based  in the Villanova area, he was well known throughout the order and particularly to those training for the priesthood, including the young Robert Prevost. Fr. Atkinson had worked inspiringly in religious education for most of his priestly life, and after his death it became evident that he had lived a life of unusual holiness, resulting in an investigation in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that led to the presentation in 2021 of the initial case for his advancement towards sainthood. 

In the meantime, back in Maynooth, an Irish-American couple had taken possession in 2017 of Carton House, the former home of the Dukes of Leinster, by now a resort hotel. John and Joan Mullen have a long history of generosity to church and charity, and have supported several development initiatives at St. Patrick's College, recognised by the naming of a dining hall for seminarians in honour of a member of the Mullen family, a Vincentian priest. But Joan Mullen has another distinction: she is the former Joan Atkinson and a sister of the late Fr. Bill.

Fr. Atkinson's cause is well known to the new Pope, whose pectoral cross indicates an unusual devotion to saints and prospective saints of Augustinian background. The cross, which is in a form that can be opened, was given to him by his order when he was made a cardinal in 2023. It contains tiny pieces of the bones of three key Augustinian saints: the fifth century St Augustine, whose writings inspired the order's foundation in 1244, his mother, St Monica, and St Thomas of Villanova, a 16th-century Spanish Augustinian archbishop (the Villanova in this case referring to the Spanish city of that name).

The cross also contains the bone relics of two other important Augustinians: Anselmo Polanco, a beatified Spanish bishop who was executed during the Spanish Civil War in 1939, and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Menocchio, an 18th-century Italian bishop.

In addition to Fr. Atkinson, there are two other members of the order who have been declared Servants of God in recognition of the fact that their causes for sainthood have already been initiated: Fr. John McNiff, a Pennsylvania-born missionary who worked in Cuba (from which he and thirty-seven other Augustinians were expelled), the Philippines and Peru and who died in 1994, and Fr. Serapio Rivero Nicolás, who worked for almost sixty years in the same  community in his native Spain as pastor, teacher and spiritual director until his death in 2002. (In 2019 the Augustinians in the U.S. produced an account of members of the order who had achieved the various stages on the route to sainthood under the title 'Hearts on Fire', authored by Fr. Michael de Gregorio OSA).

It will be interesting to see if Pope Leo XIV gets to canonise any of these eminent holy men of his order, but their stories and causes certainly give hope and prominence to the impressive record of Augustinians in the modern world, now crowned by the election of one of their number as Supreme Pontiff.

*The new Pope has both a licentiate and doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. His doctoral thesis was on “The role of the local prior in the Order of Saint Augustine.”