Pope Leo XIV’s “Freedom Under Grace” released in English
Pope Leo XIV’s book “Freedom Under Grace” was released in English on September 15, 2026, available in the US, UK, Australia, and the Commonwealth. The book compiles the Pope’s reflections on St. Augustine’s legacy, including addresses, homilies, and personal writings that shaped his spirituality and vision. It is the first book by an Augustinian Pope and highlights the first American Pope whose mother tongue is English, offering a unique perspective on Catholic life. The English edition is published by Penguin Random House imprints (Image Books in the US, Enlighten in the UK and Australia) and includes an audiobook featuring Stephen Colbert and Scott Brick.
16 days ago
Pope Leo XIV’s Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me was released in English on September 15, 2026, offering readers a collection of reflections rooted in the spirituality of St. Augustine. The edition is being distributed across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and the Commonwealth. 1
The volume brings together addresses, homilies, and personal writings from Robert Prevost’s years as Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine. The material presents the background to his contemplative responses and explains how Augustine’s legacy influenced his spiritual outlook. 1
As the first pope from the Order of St. Augustine, Leo XIV uses the book to highlight the tradition that shaped him. The English edition also gives English-speaking readers access to the perspective of the Church’s first American pope, whose mother tongue is English. 1
The book addresses the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, emerging political ideologies, and the Church’s responses to poverty and conflicts involving human rights. Its reflections draw on St. Augustine, whom Leo describes as his spiritual father. 1
The work presents a vision centered on community, solidarity, and service to marginalized people. 1
In the United States, the book is published by Image Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group. In the United Kingdom and Australia, it is issued by Penguin Random House UK’s Enlighten imprint. 1
The original Italian edition was published by the Vatican Publishing House under the title Liberi sotto la Grazia. 1
The audiobook will include opening homilies and addresses read by Emmy Award-winning comedian and Catholic Stephen Colbert, while award-winning narrator and Grammy nominee Scott Brick will narrate the main text. 1
"Assess Augustinian influence on modern Catholic liberty."
Augustinian influence on modern Catholic liberty is substantial but indirect. Augustine supplies the theological grammar: freedom is not mere choice or indifference, but liberation from sin through grace, truth, and love. Modern Catholic teaching—especially on conscience, human dignity, and religious liberty—develops this insight in a more juridical and political form, while also relying heavily on Thomistic natural-law categories.
For Augustine, the deepest human problem is not external coercion but interior slavery. Disordered passions can dominate the will, leaving a person apparently free yet unable to pursue the good. Grace heals and strengthens the will, without destroying its capacity to refuse. John Paul II summarizes this Augustinian account by emphasizing that grace makes the will victorious over evil while preserving genuine freedom; love enables obedience to become free rather than merely compelled.
Thus Augustine’s liberty is fundamentally freedom for the good, not simply freedom from restraint. Its culmination is eschatological: complete freedom consists in the inability to sin and the inability to die. This differs sharply from modern liberal accounts that define liberty primarily as individual autonomy or the absence of interference.
Augustine also links freedom to truth. Ratzinger explains that, for Augustine, a person becomes free by “coming home” to the truth: separation from truth is not liberation but alienation from oneself. This anticipates the modern Catholic insistence that freedom and truth cannot ultimately be separated.
This Augustinian structure remains visible in the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Modern Catholic thought rejects the idea that freedom is morally neutral or self-defining. Freedom is rooted in the truth about the human person and ordered toward communion with God and others. John Paul II therefore distinguishes authentic freedom from “false autonomy”: freedom is not freedom from truth but freedom within truth.
This does not mean that Catholic teaching denies civil liberty. Rather, it grounds civil liberty in human dignity. Dignitatis humanae teaches that persons, endowed with reason and free will, have a right to religious freedom in the civil order. That right protects people from coercion in religious matters; it does not imply that all religious claims are equally true or that the individual has no moral duty to seek truth.
Here Augustine’s influence is evident in the distinction between:
The first is a juridical protection; the second is the fuller theological meaning of liberty.
It would be inaccurate to attribute modern Catholic religious liberty simply to Augustine. The contemporary formulation also depends on Thomistic ideas of natural law, human dignity, the common good, and the legitimate autonomy of created realities. One influential analysis contrasts an Augustinian tendency to emphasize the sharp opposition between sin and grace with a Thomistic tendency to recognize the intrinsic order and relative stability of nature.
That distinction helps explain why modern Catholic teaching can affirm both human freedom and institutional or constitutional protections without reducing freedom to spiritual liberation alone. Dignitatis humanae addresses freedom in society, especially the free exercise of religion, and relates it to the common good.
Augustine’s categories therefore require political and philosophical development before they can become a doctrine of civil liberty. His writings are principally concerned with the soul’s conversion, the Church, grace, sin, and the final destiny of humanity—not with a modern constitutional theory of religious rights.
Augustinian influence is strongest at the level of meaning, rather than legal structure. Augustine helps modern Catholicism insist that:
Modern Catholic liberty adds a necessary civil distinction: even when a person is mistaken, the state may not simply coerce religious belief or practice. Yet this civil protection must not be confused with the Augustinian ideal of perfected freedom. Catholic teaching consequently holds together two claims that modern debates often separate: people possess a right not to be coerced in religion, and they also possess a moral obligation to seek and follow religious truth.
Augustine’s influence is therefore decisive but transformed. He provides the Church’s profound account of liberty as liberation into truth and love; Thomistic natural-law reasoning and Vatican II translate that account into a doctrine of human dignity and religious freedom within society.