Pope Leo XIV gives a blessing during a meeting with participants in the Jubilee of Eastern Churches on May 14, 2025, in the Paul VI Audience Hall at the Vatican. / Credit: Vatican Media Vatican City, May 15, 2025 / 15:33 pm (CNA). In the first week of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, his preaching and speeches have featured quotations from saints and Church Fathers from St. Ignatius of Antioch to St. Gregory the Great.The Catholic Church’s first pope from the Augustinian order is already helping to educate the faithful through his deep knowledge of the Church Fathers. Here is who he has been citing in the foundation-setting first week of his pontificate.St. Augustine (354–430)Catholics are virtually guaranteed to be hearing a lot more great quotes from St. Augustine in the upcoming years of this pontificate. In his first appearance on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8, Pope Leo said: “I am an Augustinian, a son of St. Augustine, who once said, ‘With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop.’”Leo gifted us with another classic St. Augustine quote again during his speech to journalists on May 12: “Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times (Discourse 80.8).”His papal motto under his coat of arms also features a line from St. Augustine, “In Illo uno unum,” which means “In the One, we are one.” It comes from a discussion of Psalm 128 (127 in the Latin Vulgate) in Augustine’s “Expositions of the Psalms”: “It is not as though he were one and we many; no, we who are many are one in him, who is one.”St. Ignatius of Antioch (second century)In his first Mass as pope, Leo XIV identified himself as the successor of Peter with St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was famously martyred by being thrown to the lions. In his homily in the Sistine Chapel on May 9 he reflected on a line from St. Ignatius of Antioch’s second-century “Letter to the Romans”: “Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body.” “I say this first of all to myself, as the successor of Peter, as I begin my mission as bishop of Rome and, according to the well-known expression of St. Ignatius of Antioch, am called to preside in charity over the universal Church (cf. Letter to the Romans, Prologue),” Leo said. “St. Ignatius, who was led in chains to this city, the place of his impending sacrifice, wrote to the Christians there: ‘Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body’ (Letter to the Romans, IV, 1).“Ignatius was speaking about being devoured by wild beasts in the arena — and so it happened — but his words apply more generally to an indispensable commitment for all those in the Church who exercise a ministry of authority. It is to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified (cf. Jn 3:30), to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.”St. Gregory the Great (540–604)In Pope Leo’s first Regina Caeli address in which he sang the famous Marian prayer in Latin, he also quoted St. Gregory the Great, who he said teaches people to “respond to the love of those who love them (Homily 14:3-6).”St. Ephrem the Syrian (306–373)In Pope Leo XIV’s speech to the Eastern Catholic Churches, he cited the writings of several Eastern Church Fathers, among them St. Ephrem the Syrian, who is a theologian venerated in both the Catholic Church and Orthodox churches, especially in Syriac Christianity.Pope Leo said: “Together, we can pray with St. Ephrem the Syrian and say to the Lord Jesus: ‘Glory to you, who laid your cross as a bridge over death… Glory to you who clothed yourself in the body of mortal man, and made it the source of life for all mortals’ (Homily on Our Lord, 9).”St. Isaac of Nineveh (613–700)Notably, Pope Leo also chose to quote St. Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh-century Assyrian bishop venerated across Christian traditions, whom Pope Francis added to the Roman Martyrology last November during a meeting with Mar Awa III, Catholicos-patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East.Pope Leo XIV said: “We must ask, then, for the grace to see the certainty of Easter in every trial of life and not to lose heart, remembering, as another great Eastern Father wrote, that ‘the greatest sin is not to believe in the power of the Resurrection’ (St. Isaac Of Nineveh, Sermones ascetici, I, 5).”St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022)In his speech to the Eastern Churches, Pope Leo also quoted an Eastern Orthodox monk, St. Symeon the New Theologian, who is also venerated in the Byzantine Catholic Churches.  The pope said that St. Symeon used an eloquent image: “‘Just as one who throws dust on the flame of a burning furnace extinguishes it, so the cares of this life and every kind of attachment to petty and worthless things destroy the warmth of the heart that was initially kindled’ (Practical and Theological Chapters, 63).”St. John Paul II (1920–2005)The new pope has not limited