Robert Francis Prevost, who was elected 267th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church on Thursday and took the name of Pope Leo XIV, is the first pope of the United States.
The decision of the 133 voting cardinals, which arrived in a plume of white smoke at the end of their second voting day within the secret of the Sistine Chapel, has long challenged that church leaders would never select a pope of a global superpower which already has a considerable influence in world affairs.
Taking the name of Pope Leo XIV, the immediate successor of Pope Francis has the potential to shake up the structure of world Catholic power.
As a American, he is only placed to contrast with energetic conservative Catholicism in his country of origin, and has rejected with force against the militant vision of Christian power that the Trump administration raised.
Despite its American roots, the polyglot born in Chicago, 69, is considered a man of the church who transcends borders. He served for two decades in Peru, where he became bishop and a naturalized citizen, then got up to direct his international religious order. Under Pope Francis, he held one of the most influential positions of the Vatican, managing the office which selects and manages the bishops on a global scale.
This made him an attractive choice for the Roman Curia, the powerful bureaucracy which governs the Church and which, after having frequently experienced reprimands and upheavals of Pope Francis, wanted someone who knew and appreciated the institution.
Member of the Order of Saint-Augustin, he shared Francis’ commitment to help the poor and migrants. Last year, the official website of the Vatican news said that “the bishop was not supposed to be a small prince sitting in his kingdom, but rather authentically called to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them and to seek ways to better experience the message of the Gospel in the middle of his people.”
Often described as reserved and discreet, he will probably leave stylistically Francis as a pope. Supporters believe that he will most likely continue the advisory process launched by Francis to include laymen during certain meetings with bishops.
In a conclave with ideological divisions between those who wanted to continue the inclusive program of Pope Francis but sometimes provocative, and those who preferred to return to a more conservative path focused on doctrinal purity, Pope Leo XIV probably represented a balanced alternative.
“It is not a great terrain,” said Reverend Mark R. Francis, a former classmate by Cardinal Prevost, who directs the American branch of the clerics of St. Vator, a religious order, in Chicago.
“It is a very balanced and measured person who deals with the crisis in a certain sense,” said Father Francis. “It didn’t disturb him. He thinks things and offer very stable leadership.”
He has spent much of his life outside the United States. Ordered in Rome in 1982 at the age of 27, he received a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also in Rome. In Peru, he was missionary, parish priest, teacher and bishop. As a chief of the Augustins, he visited orders from around the world and he speaks Spanish and Italian.
Francis sought to extend the geographic diversity of the church hierarchy and appointed many new cardinals, some from countries that had never had before. Francis gave Cardinal Prevost his red hat in 2023, making him one of the most recent members of the College of Cardinals who elected him.
A diplomatic treaty demanded that he be naturalized as a citizen of Peru before becoming bishop in Chiclayo, a city in the northwest of the country. During his time as a chiclayo bishop, he frequently visited distant communities.
He incorporated laity into pastoral social work, said Yolanda Díaz, teacher and member of the church of Chiclayo. “Instead of thinking of pastoral work like people who go to church,” she said, “he wanted the church to go to people.”
Sister Dianne Bergant, who taught him in the Bible courses at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he received a master’s deed in 1982, said he was a quiet “student”. She said that when he was appointed Cardinal decades after being a student in his class, he immediately responded to an email of congratulations that she sent him, thanking her for helping her in her theological development.
Pope Leo XIV may not be as openly welcoming in the tone to LGBTQ people as his predecessor, who said “Who am I to judge?” Asked about gay clerics.
In an address of 2012 to the bishops, before the often mentioned words of Pope Francis, Cardinal Prevost deplored that the Western information media and popular culture have favored “sympathy of beliefs and practices that are in contradiction with the Gospel”. He cited the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families made up of same -sex partners and their adopted children”.
As a bishop in Chiclayo, he opposed a government plan to add gender lessons in schools. “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create sexes that do not exist,” he told local media.
Cardinal Prevost, like many others who ultimately elected him, has aroused criticism of his relations with priests accused of sexual abuse.
In Chicago, defenders of victims of sexual abuse say that his office did not warn a neighboring Catholic school that a priest who determined that the church leaders had abused young boys for years was sheltered in a monastery nearby, from 2000. As head of the Midwest Order of the Augastinians at the time, Cardinal Prevost Monastery.
Friends say he is relaxed and humble, passing by the Augustin monastery in Rome to eat with priests in order and still washing his own dishes, said Reverend Alejandro Moral Antón, the successor to Cardinal Prévost as a Augustinian chief in Rome.
Reverend Michele Falcone, 46, a priest in the order of Saint-Augustin previously led by Cardinal Prevost, said that his mentor and his friend had a collaborative leadership style and could be flexible depending on the context. It could wear very formal clothes for an imperial mass while dressed in more casual ways for a local parish.
He is known for playing a tennis game and is a baseball fan, explaining the rules to some of his Italian and compatriots Augustinian. However, said Father Falcone: “It’s not like Pope Francis. His passion does not reach these levels. “
In recent years, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, led by Cardinal Base J. Cupich, has become an important region of support on Pope Francis’ agenda for the Church.
The Chicagoans immediately rejected the news that the first American pope was from their city. Father William Lego, the pastor of St. Turibus church in Chicago, knew the new pope when they were young seminarians.
“I think my classmate has just had it,” he said, seeming to be amazed, from his office. “They chose a good man. He always had this feeling of being aware of the poor and trying to help them. ”
When his name was announced for the first time in the place, many in the crowd were completely perplexed. “Not Italian?” Several said, and a man replayed the announcement he had captured on his phone to see if he could hear the name.
Behind him, Nicole Serena, 21, a Italian-American studying marketing in Rome, said: “I think that a American pope has just been elected.”
Benjamin Smith 20, from Crosby, Minnesota, said that he had never heard of Cardinal Prevost. “But it’s so great,” said Smith, a student in exchange for theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas, where the cardinal received his doctorate. “I’m so excited,” said Smith.
In Peru, Father Pedro Vásquez, 82, priest in Chiclayo, where Cardinal Prevost was archbishop, was so excited that he said that “my heart will make me fail!”
“I’m going to vanish!” He said, “Oh my God, Oh my God!”
MITRA TAJ contributed Lima’s reports, Peru, Julie Turkewitz de Bogotá, Colombia, Joséphine de La Bruyère from Rome and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
