June 30, 2025

Re: "Pope Leo XIV, Villanova University, and (Postconciliar) Catholic Philosophy"

On Thursday, May 8, 2025, Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, Prefect of Apostolic Signatura, appeared on the central loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City and proclaimed “Habemus papam.” It was the second day of the papal conclave, and the Collegium Cardinalium had elected the Catholic Church’s 267th pope. His birth name, as the world soon learned, was Robert Francis Prevost. He took the pontifical name of Pope Leo XIV. Though a number of these details are significant, especially Prevost’s adoption of the name “Leo,” the most salient aspect of his election was that Prevost is the first pope to have been born in the United States and in North America—qualities that, according to many commentators, made him unelectable. As Francis X. Rocca explains:

Nearly every Vatican insider agreed on one thing: The United States would never produce a pope, at least not while the country remains a superpower. A citizen of the world’s dominant nation could not become the leader of the world’s largest religious organization without dramatically upsetting the global balance of geopolitical and cultural power. Or so the thinking went.

Even Prevost himself assumed that he had no chance of becoming Bishop of Rome. As he told a friend in February 2025, “I’’m an American, I can’t be elected.’”

But elected he was, and in the days following the announcement the newly minted Pope Leo XIV undertook the customary inaugural acts. On May 18, with roughly 200,000 people in attendance, he celebrated the Mass for the Beginning of the Petrine Ministry of the Bishop of Rome—a tradition that starts with the new pope descending beneath the baldachin of the high altar of St. Peter’s basilica and singing the hymn “Tu es Petrus” before the tomb of Peter the Apostle It was also at this time that Pope Leo XIV received the regal pallium and the so-called Piscatory Ring (Anulus piscatoris)—items that distinguish the his role as head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. A week later, the Pope’s episcopal installation took place at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, which is the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome.

Amid the liturgical ceremoniousness of Pope Leo XIV’s first week, the usual commentators and pundits chimed in. As one might expect, there was much reflection on the fact that Pope Leo XIV was the first American pope. Others chose to home in on his status as the “first Augustinian friar” to assume the Cathedra Petri. A smaller, but no less enthusiastic, subset of articles focused on the fact that the Pope is a big fan of the Chicago White Sox.

And yet, what stuck out to me most was that Pope Leo XIV is a graduate of Villanova University—my academic home since 2012. Since Villanova is the Order of Saint Augustine’s flagship institution, and since I have worked with a number of Augustinians over the years, my first thought was: “Have I met the Pope before? Is there a chance he was on campus and I ran across him, not knowing who he was (or would be)?” I texted a few colleagues, who said that he had been on a campus plenty of times, though not at events involving the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (Villanova’s campus also contains the St. Thomas of Villanova Monastery). My next thought was that I was happy for the order. Like any corporate body, the Augustinians are a diverse bunch, but my interactions with them have been almost universally positive. It was not long ago that a student with whom I worked closely for years (as both an undergraduate and a graduate student) entered the Augustinian novitiate and has recently become a priest and brother within the order—accomplishments that I’m proud to have been a part of, however modestly.

In a sense, then, I feel a certain familiarity with Pope Leo XIV. I can easily imagine his academic formation, his conventual associates, and even his love of sports, which was no doubt furthered at basketball-crazed Villanova. Indeed, by way of an aside, it is notable that the Pope’s time at Villanova coincided with the beginning of Coach Rollie Massimino’s historic tenure at the university. Taking over for Jack Kraft, who himself had guided Villanova to a Final Four in 1970-71, Massimino got off to a rough start. Yet, he turned a corner during the pope’s senior year at Villanova, guiding the team to a 23-10 record and an impressive run in the National Invitation Tournament. Less than a decade later, Villanova would be national champions for the first (but not last!) time.

Not surprisingly, my colleagues at Villanova were having similar thoughts. For example, Greg Grimes wrote an insightful piece on Pope Leo XIV for the Notre Dame-based publication Church Life Journal. Yet, perhaps the most eye-catching statement was issued by John D. (“Jack”) Caputo—longtime philosophy professor and almost legendary presence at Villanova—who posted the following statement to social media:

I’m proud to say that I had the pope in my ‘German Existentialism and Phenomenology’ course in the spring semester of his senior year (1977). So he’s fully prepared for the job based on what he read about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger.

So, Pope Leo XIV studied existentialism and phenomenology with noted deconstructionist Jack Caputo. What, if anything, might this detail tell us about his pontificate?

First, it is worth noting that Caputo’s career is often divided into “eras” or “periods.” A proud native of Philadelphia, Caputo graduated from LaSalle University in 1962 and remained in metro Philly for graduate school, receiving a Master’s degree from Villanova in 1964 and a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. Early in his career, Caputo was a decidedly Catholic thinker, who wanted to put the faith in dialogue with the tradition of continental philosophy—that is to say, with thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Later, after studying and working with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Caputo authored a string of books that broke from his roots in scholastic philosophy and Catholic dogma, including Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic (1987), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997), On Religion (2001), and The Weakness of God (2006), among others. Today, as he approaches his 85th birthday, Caputo is often thought of as a figurehead for a movement known as “radical theology,” which he defines as follows:

Radical theology is not about…a being called God, and how we can prove that being exists. It is about what I call the event that is going on in the name of God, what is calling in that name, what is being called for, which is a form of life. The key to radical theology is to put the supernatural attitude out of action and try to ferret out the more elemental faith that is going on in religious beliefs. Beliefs are what is in our heads in virtue of an accident of birth. If you were switched at birth and raised in a completely different culture where they never heard of Jesus, you wouldn't be a Christian. You would be different, but you wouldn't be any less for that.

In matters of the elemental mystery of things, nobody has inside information handed down from supernatural sources. Nobody gets to go over the head of other mortals. That's a mystification, and it's dangerous. The name of God is a way to name what we truly love, but in radical theology we ask, is love the best name we have for God, or is God the best name we have for love? Preserving that undecidability is of the essence of radical theology. We should not love what we believe, we should believe what we love, what is deeply and truly worthy of our love, in which we have a faith that may or may not take the form of a religious belief and could show up in any number of different forms.

Doubtless some of Caputo’s later thought was nascent in his earlier work, but it is worth underlining that Bob Prevost, the eventual pope, did not study under Jack Caputo, the “radical theologian.” Their paths crossed at a different time, when Caputo was focused more on “German Existentialism and Phenomenology” than on postmodern French deconstruction.

What difference might that make? In 2022, the first volume of Caputo’s archives was released, entitled The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers Volume 1: 1969–1985 Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism, Thought. In the book’s introduction, Caputo admits that “readers of my work since Radical Hermeneutics will probably be surprised by a good deal of the work collected in this volume.” This is because he identified himself as a “Catholic philosopher” at the time, albeit one who was caught up in the seismic cultural and intellectual shifts within the Church following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). As Caputo recalls:

Many Catholic philosophers were, like me, former priests, seminarians or ex-members of religious orders, who gradually took over the philosophy departments as the ranks of the priesthood and religious orders were depleted after Vatican II. Along with many Catholic friends we gave papers at the annual association meeting on phenomenology and Existentialism and the contribution they made to the cause of fides quaerens intellectum. There were many papers on Gabriel Marcel and lots of debate about “Christian versus atheistic Existentialism,” trying to convince the grey elders in the Association, many of them priests, to give it a hearing.

For his own part, Caputo was rooted in the metaphysics of Saint Thomas Aquinas, even harboring a “special interest in Thomistic angelology,” but by the time he started teaching at Villanova in 1968 he was already embarking on a new (if not yet subversive) path, which moved from the origins of continental philosophy in Kierkegaard’s existentialism to the phenomenological breakthroughs of Heidegger and his teacher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938).

As it turns out, Pope Leo XIV had a front row seat for Caputo’s evolution, since the course that he took with Caputo charted precisely this trajectory. As Caputo puts it, “For thirty years, I taught my favorite undergraduate course, ‘German Existentialism and Phenomenology,’ at Villanova…in which I covered Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first quarter and Husserl and Heidegger in the second.” Needless to say, Caputo does not provide the 1977 syllabus for this course in his archival collection. However, there is no question that the first volume of Collected Papers contains a number of writings that made their way into Caputo’s lectures.

Here I will limit myself to two broad points of overlap. First, it is clear that Caputo would have presented the young Robert Prevost with a mystically-charged understanding of Catholic intellectual life. In his 1971 essay “The Rose is Without Why: An Interpretation of the Later Heidegger,” Caputo surveys Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre) from a robust humanism to something mysterious, transcendent. Whereas before Heidegger’s authentic person was to press for answers to the question of the meaning of Being, now he “reaches the fullness of its Being only when it suspends its questioning and lets Being be.” As Caputo explains, “Genuine questioning is possible only if Dasein transcends its inner-worldly involvements, if it resolutely fixes its attention upon the meaning of Being itself and not upon inner-worldly beings.” With this in mind, Caputo highlights Heidegger’s fondness for the poetry of the German Franciscan priest and poet Angelus Silesius (1624-77):

The rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms;

It thinks not upon itself, nor does it ask if anyone sees it.

A human being, Heidegger says in his 1955-56 lecture course The Principle of Reason (Der Satz vom Grund), is only truly human when he comes to resemble the rose—not doubting or seeking, just waiting for Being. According to Caputo, this reassessment of Dasein’s authenticity—that is, of the highest mode of the human way of being—places Heidegger in an intellectual tradition extending past Angelus Silesius to the German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1328). For Silesius, as for Eckhart and the later Heidegger, the human soul flourishes not when it focuses on its own desires but, rather, when it opens itself to the “sunlight and mild temperatures” of God’s loving will.

Later during this period of philosophical evolution—indeed, for all we know, perhaps coming to fruition during Pope Leo XIV’s exact tenure at Villanova—Caputo began to focus on the topic of “phenomenology and ethics.” In 1979, for example, he issued the short paper “The Presence of the Other: A Phenomenology of the Human Person.” Here, following the later Heidegger and, more explicitly, the French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61), Caputo continues his critique of the Cartesian “cogito,” arguing that phenomenology can restore “the vitality of our pre-objective Being with others.” In other words, “Phenomenology wants to restore our primordial contact with the world and with one another.” How is this possible? First, phenomenology reminds us that human beings are “imbedded” in the things around them. A home is not just a shelter but a site where character and values are made manifest, whether by way of the art that one prefers (original oil paintings or posters of The Clash?), or the decor that one features (Scandinavian minimalism or rustic naturalism?). Second, phenomenology retrieves our bodily sense of being-in-the-world. Even before I can ask myself if the person next to me at the bar is real, I am already positioning my elbow to avoid knocking over his beer. “My point,” Caputo writes, “is that I intend the body of the other in a radically different way than I intend other things, and this unique intentionality is inscribed in our very pre-objective being.” In demonstrating this point, phenomenology lays the groundwork for Christian ethics, which, Caputo insists, “must above all defend the dignity and the uniqueness of the person against all reductionisms.”

It is reasonable to conclude that Caputo would have exposed young Robert Prevost to these (and other related) ideas and thinkers. At that time, moreover, Heidegger’s philosophical reworking of German mysticism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological emphasis on corporeality would have been presented as completing, not contradicting, mainstream Catholic teaching. Of course, it’s hard to say with any certainty the extent to which Caputo’s teaching influenced Prevost’s decision to enter the priesthood and, finally, to assume the Chair of Saint Peter. And yet, just as Pope Leo XIV has been game to don the gear of the teams he rooted for as young man, I’m certain that he would admit that his intellectual and spiritual life was kindled and nurtured at Villanova.

To be sure, there are signs that many of the core aspects of Pope Leo XIV’s formation at Villanova remain present in his papal teaching. “Religious experience is an essential dimension of the human person,” he said during an address on May 16, “without it, it is difficult…to bring about the purification of the heart necessary for building peaceful relationships.” Here we can glimpse shades of the later Heidegger’s embrace of homo orans, rather than homo faber. Similarly, the pope’s ecclesiology already seems consonant with Merleau-Ponty’s stress on the diversity of bodily life and the irreducibility of the human person. As Pope Leo XIV recently put it, “Some misconstrue unity as uniformity: ‘You have to be the same as we are.’ No. This cannot be.”Diversity accepts the other as other. It is never a matter of shoehorning the individual into a group or a party

The new pope picked up these (and other) insights in his old life, long before he rose to the highest station in the Catholic Church. He learned them (to piggyback on Caputo’s language) in the very intentionality of his bodily existence, whether by attending classes on Villanova’s campus or by sitting on the CTA’s Red Line, crammed in (gasp!) next to a Cubs fan. In a peculiar but refreshing way, that gives me confidence.