Leo says this letter can help you pray: Here’s what it says

Aboard the papal flight to Algeria this week. Pope Leo XIV, speaking with journalists, pointed to a fourth-century letter: Letter 130 to Proba by St. Augustine of Hippo.

The recommendation opens a window into the Pope’s Augustinian identity — one he has embraced openly since his election, calling himself a “son of Augustine.” That heritage shapes his language, and the spiritual path he proposes to the wider Church.

In Letter to Proba, Augustine responds to a sincere question: How should one pray, especially when Scripture itself admits that “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26)?

Prayer, he explains, is not primarily about words, but about desire. “To prolong prayer,” Augustine writes, “is to have the heart throbbing with continued pious emotion.” What matters is not eloquence but longing — a steady orientation of the soul toward God.

This insight, highlighted by Pope Leo, cuts through a modern anxiety: the pressure to “do prayer right.” Augustine frees the believer from “technique.” Even wordless yearning can be more authentic than carefully constructed phrases. True prayer stretches the heart, enlarging its capacity to receive what it seeks but cannot yet fully grasp.

Augustine’s teaching on prayer is inseparable from his understanding of happiness. In Letter 130, he insists that every human being ultimately desires a happy life — and that this happiness is nothing less than God Himself.

This theme echoes his earlier work, On the Happy Life, one of the Cassiciacum Dialogues written shortly after his conversion. There, Augustine explores happiness as a participation in truth and communion with God. The restless search for fulfillment, so familiar today, finds its answer in alignment with the divine.

Prayer, then, becomes the training ground of desire. We ask for what we cannot yet see, and in asking, we learn to want rightly.

Pope Leo’s recommendation is especially fitting given his pilgrimage through North Africa — the land where Augustine served as bishop of Hippo. His visit to the basilica near Hippo Regius is a return to spiritual roots.

In fact, in the same conversation with the OSVNews journalist, he said: “On this trip especially I would say if anyone has not read ‘The Confessions of St. Augustine,’ it is a great place to start."

This continuity also explains the Pope’s recurring references to Augustine, even with a touch of humor, as Mares recounts. The saint’s voice offers something enduringly relevant: a way of understanding the human heart that speaks across centuries.