Pope Leo XIV at the Tomb of Saint Augustine
Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, Pavia · 20 June 2026. Watch the Vatican News video and hear the official Vatican Radio / Vatican News recording.
Et venio in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium imaginum.
“I come to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images.”
An Augustinian moment in the life of the Church.
On 8 May 2025, Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV — the first Augustinian Pope in the history of the Church. Before his election he had spent decades within the Order of Saint Augustine and served two terms as its Prior General.
This does not imply any Vatican affiliation with The Augustine Project. It does mean that a project concerned with Augustine, memory and the preservation of lived experience begins at an extraordinary moment: Augustine is unusually present in the public life of the Church.
Preserving the living memory of the Church.
I am a writer. I am interested in what disappears before anyone realizes that it has become history: what an elderly priest remembers after fifty years, what a religious sister or brother remembers about a community that has changed, and what parishioners remember about a church before the doors close.
The records may survive. The people who can explain what those records meant will not always be here.
A conversation becomes a piece of writing worth keeping.
The purpose is not to produce another transcript, chronology, public-relations piece or institutional summary. It is to preserve a human voice and the knowledge carried inside it while the person who lived that history can still tell us what it meant.
The interview
Approximately one hour by secure video, with enough room for memory to become specific rather than merely chronological.
The narrative
I turn the conversation into approximately 1,200–1,500 words of continuous finished prose. It is not a transcript.
The record
The interviewee receives one factual-correction round. Nothing is invented. Where memory or documentary evidence ends, the writing says so.
The name is deliberate.
Augustine has been my teacher for a long time. As a Jewish writer, I have been moved by the seriousness with which he examined memory, experience, truth and the life already lived.
I am not borrowing a Catholic identity. I am naming the project for a writer and thinker who understood that memory is not merely storage. It is part of how a human life becomes intelligible.
The premise should not persuade you. The writing should.
The usefulness of this project depends upon whether the finished narrative actually carries a human voice honestly enough to deserve preservation.
The Globe and Mail
The Missouri Review
Intima
STAT News
The person interviewed remains a person, not source material.
An introduction is enough to begin.
If there is a priest, religious sister or brother, parishioner or community member whose living memory should be preserved, I would be grateful for an introduction. The first pilot is deliberately small and carries no diocesan cost.
Montréal, Québec
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