Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Robert Prevost, addresses the crowd from balcony of the St Peter's Basilica on Thursday.
Image: Alberto Pizzoli / AFP
By Chico Harlan and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux
ROBERT Prevost broke a historical taboo against American popes with a path that was anything but typically American.
Though the man now called Leo XIV is a Chicago native, he is known in Rome as the “Latin Yankee” for the decades he spent in Peru, ministering to the dispossessed and marginalised and even becoming a naturalised citizen. Until several weeks ago, he held one of the most important Vatican posts, overseeing the powerful office that vets bishops from around the world.
His rise - as a multilingual American with global experience and contacts - marks an attempt by the Catholic Church to find a middle ground at a time of wide internal divisions.
In some ways, Leo clearly follows the mould of Pope Francis, who died last month at 88. He has long espoused a commitment to social justice issues, and two years ago, he described his vision for the church - with goals of “reaching out to the poor, to the neediest, to those on the margins” - in language mirroring that of Francis.
Prevost was twice elected to head the centuries-old Order of St Augustine. But his new position is so stratospheric - leading 1.2 billion people around the globe - that it can be risky to extrapolate too much about how he’ll approach the job, said the Rev William Lego, a parish priest in Chicago who went to high school and college with Prevost.
“Once you’re in the chair, everything changes,” Lego said. “You have to be open to the changes. But one thing I know about Bob - he is very discerning. He listens to a lot of people. He’s not quick to judge.”
The new pope choked back tears as he walked out onto the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the first time Thursday evening. He read his first address in Italian, starting with, “Peace be with you all.”
His lush vestments, in deep red and gold, represented the kind of stylings of the position that Francis had generally shunned - even as Leo spoke warmly about his predecessor.
“We can be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges, that is always open to receive everyone - just like in this square, to welcome everyone, in charity, dialogue and love,” he told the huge crowd assembled before him. He also issued a greeting in Spanish - another of the five languages he speaks - and a shout-out to his former diocese in Chiclayo, Peru.
Leo inherits no shortage of hot-button issues within the church, including on its social teachings and its stances on sexuality and women. In 2012, when he was general of the Augustinians, Prevost spoke critically to bishops in Vatican City about how “alternative families composed of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema.”
Two years ago, in a news conference, he said that women “can add a great deal to the life of the church on many different levels.” Yet the idea of ordaining women, he continued, “doesn’t necessarily solve a problem. It might make a new problem.”
Francis had turned to Prevost on repeated occasions. In 2022, he had him preside over a revolutionary reform: adding three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations go forward to the pope.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on US Catholics, said the 69-year-old Prevost ticked off all the boxes as the papal conclave voted: “a pastoral heart, managerial experience and global vision.”
In picking him, the other cardinals looked past allegations that Prevost had mishandled or failed to act on sexual abuse cases involving priests in both Peru and the United States.
He was selected despite being “an enigma to cardinals, especially to American cardinals, because he spent his life outside of the United States,” said Jon Morris, a theologian and former priest who has been in Rome to observe the transition as a Fox News contributor.
The new pope’s childhood roots were deep on Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up worshipping at St Mary of the Assumption Church on East 137th Street. The local media has reported that his father, of French and Italian ancestry, was an educator who served in the church as a catechist and that his mother, of Spanish ancestry, was a librarian. Members of the clergy would come to his family’s home from across Illinois for community and his mother’s tasty cooking, according to the Pillar, a Catholic media project.
As a youth, he served as an altar boy and went to the parish school and then a seminary high school. He attended Villanova University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1977. He was ordained five years later and completed a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Then came two decades of service in Peru, much of it as a missionary and parish priest.
Francis tracked Prevost’s career for years, sending him back to Peru in 2014 after appointing him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo, in the country’s northwest. In 2015, he was named bishop there.
In 2023, the pope appointed Prevost to dual roles: president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and leader of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful office at the Vatican that selects bishops around the world.
“I still consider myself a missionary,” Prevost told Vatican News after he became prefect of the dicastery, a position he held until Francis’s death last month. “My vocation, like that of every Christian, is to be a missionary, to proclaim the Gospel wherever one is.”
Cummings views the outcome of the conclave as “an opportunity for US Catholics to grow closer to the global church.” And yet many Latin Americans immediately claimed him as their own on Thursday.
“Prevost has the profile of an American. But I dare say he’s got a Latin American heart,” the Rev. Hernán Quezada, who is in charge of training Jesuits in Latin America and the Caribbean, told Aristegui Noticias, a Mexican radio program. “I think he is a bridge between the North and South - an American but with a missionary background.”
In Rome, his role in two different cases of sexual abuse by priests in Chicago and Peru ultimately did not derail his candidacy.
The first case dates to about 25 years ago, when Prevost led the Augustinian Province of Chicago. A priest whom church leaders found had sexually abused minors was allowed to stay at an Augustinian monastery near a Catholic elementary school. The Vatican denied Prevost ever authorised that arrangement.
More recently, questions were raised about Prevost’s knowledge of abuse allegations in the Chiclayo diocese during his tenure as bishop. Two priests were accused of molesting three young girls, and a complaint this year by Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) alleged that “Prevost failed to open an investigation [and] sent inadequate information to Rome.”
The Vatican again denied any wrongdoing by Prevost.
“Given what we know about the pervasiveness of clerical sexual abuse, it is certainly plausible that abuse occurred on his watch; he was superior general of a congregation of priests that ministers in 50 countries across the globe,” Cummings said. “It’s also entirely conceivable that he failed to act decisively in punishing perpetrators and supporting victims, but, sadly, that’s true of almost all the men who occupied positions of high leadership in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. The cardinal electors would be hard-pressed to find a man among their number whose record on this issue is spotless.”
In a 2023 interview with Vatican News, Prevost spoke about the essential leadership quality of a bishop.
“Pope Francis has spoken of four types of closeness: closeness to God, to brother bishops, to priests and to all God’s people,” he said. “One must not give in to the temptation to live isolated, separated in a palace, satisfied with a certain social level or a certain level within the church.
“And we must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today,” he continued. “The authority we have is to serve, to accompany priests, to be pastors and teachers.”
* Anthony Faiola in Rome, Valentina Muñoz Castillo in Mexico City and Mikhail Klimentov in Washington contributed to this report.