VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Chicago Sun-Times [Chicago IL]
May 3, 2025
By Lauren FitzPatrick
Cardinal Robert Prevost joins the conclave Wednesday to pick Pope Francis’ successor. His rise in the faith began at a South Side church. “Even as a young teenager, he knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go,” a schoolmate says.
To people who grew up in the old St. Mary of the Assumption parish on 137th Street, it’s no surprise that one of their own, Cardinal Robert Prevost, will be part of the conclave that will gather starting Wednesday in the Sistine Chapel to choose the next pope.
Prevost, 69, was elevated to cardinal by Pope Francis in 2023 and now leads the influential Vatican office that selects and manages bishops.
“It was pretty apparent back then that was going to be his route,” John Doughney, a fellow St. Mary’s grade school graduate from 1969, says of Prevost’s path to the priesthood. “Some of us had considered it. It was kind of a fantasy for most young men. For him, I think it was true calling. And, even as a young teenager, he knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go.”
Prevost’s rise to become an influential figure at the Vatican began in Dolton as it grew, taking in thousands of people moving from apartments in Chicago to new homes in the south suburb during the post-World War II boom.
Catholics moving there typically landed at the St. Mary of the Assumption on the far southern edge of Chicago, straddling the line with Dolton. That’s where the Prevost family — Louis, an educator, Mildred, a librarian, and their sons Louis, John and Robert — were known at bustling St. Mary’s as dedicated and devout musicians, altar boys, lectors and volunteers.
Now, Prevost’s name has been floated among those who might be chosen as the next pope, though American cardinals are considered long shots because of the global power of the United States and its sharply divided politics. There never has been a pope from the United States.
Like St. Mary’s, other Catholic institutions that helped shape the future cardinal are long gone, closed over the past several decades as the Catholic population around where he grew up and elsewhere plummeted. Among those bygone institutions:
• Mendel College Prep High School, where Prevost and his mother worked.
• St. Augustine Seminary High School in Michigan.
• Tolentine College in Olympia Fields, the suburb where he briefly lived.
• Mount Carmel Elementary School in Chicago Heights, where his father was principal.
Prevost, who attended Pope Francis’ funeral on April 26, didn’t respond to interview requests. Neither did his brothers. Through the Mendel Catholic Prep Alumni Association, one of them said the family wouldn’t do any interviews.
According to his Vatican biography, the cardinal was born in Chicago in September 1955. Local records detail that Robert Francis Prevost, like his older brothers, was born at Mercy Hospital at 25th Street and Prairie Avenue.
His parents, then 35 and 43, had been living in a 1,200-square-foot brick house on East 141st Place in Dolton that they bought new in 1949, paying a $42 monthly mortgage.
Louis Prevost was the superintendent of the south suburban schools in District 169. News clippings from 1945 show he served as a Navy lieutenant in the Mediterranean in WWII. He had graduated from the old Central Y.M.C.A. College in 1943 while living in Hyde Park.
Later, the father would head Glenwood School District 167 and be the principal of Mount Carmel Elementary School in Chicago Heights, which was closed in 1990.
Mom kept the parish running
Mildred Martinez Prevost studied library science at DePaul University, getting her bachelor’s degree in 1947 at 34. Two years later, she got a master’s in education. Two of her sisters were nuns.
Her death notice, in 1990, credits her and her husband with starting the St. Mary’s library in the basement of the old school building and mentions jobs she had in the libraries at Holy Name Cathedral, Von Steuben High School on the North Side and at Mendel from 1969 to 1975.
St. Mary’s parishioners remember her as the sweet “Millie,” one of those ladies who keeps a Catholic parish running, a constant presence at the school. She was in the Altar and Rosary Society, at one point its president. With a memorable voice, she sang in the church’s choirs.
“She was one of the ladies that we called church ladies,” says Marianne Angarola, 69, who graduated with the future cardinal. “They went to Mass on a daily basis. They cleaned the altars, the church, the sacristy. She was involved in everything, including the fundraising activities. I don’t ever remember seeing her wear pants.”
Her husband “Lou was just very staunch,” says Betty Lyons-Geary, 94, a former parishioner. “He was always there for Millie. But he stayed in the background because she was always doing things at the parish.”
Noelle Neis, 69, the fourth of five children in the Horner family, remembers neighborhood blocks having 30 to 50 kids on every block. St. Mary’s, she says, was “the center of our growing-up years. It was your typical Catholic school. You could see everybody you know at church. The Prevosts always sat behind us at 9:15 a.m. Mass.”
St. Mary’s expanded in the late 1950s to keep up with its growing numbers, replacing its old church from the 1880s with a modern building.
Young Bob Prevost entered the school, with its sea of navy-and-white uniforms, before the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council modernized many rules and practices. That meant students went to mass every morning, and it was said in Latin. When the second grade had to memorize endless catechism for months to prepare for the sacraments of reconciliation and Holy Communion, Angarola says, “Robert Prevost never complained.
“We used to pray with our hands, you know, our fingers pointing to heaven, and, after a while, you get tired of doing that, and you just want to fold them over,” she says. “Robert Prevost never folded his hands over. He was just godly. Not in an in-your-face way. It was part of his aura, like he was hand-selected, and he embraced it. And he wasn’t weird. He was nice.”
Neis and her siblings remember Prevost’s time as an altar boy.
Joseph Merigold says he also was “the smartest person in the class.
“Back in the day, they used to seat us by our classroom performance, so he always sat in the No. 1 seat, which was in the first row in the back,” says Merigold, 70, who says he was often No. 2 or 3. “He was kind of a little trickster, too. Used to poke me in the back of the head with a pencil all the time because I was a kidder. So he definitely had a sense of humor that a lot of people wouldn’t know because he wasn’t really that outgoing.”
By the end of eighth grade, Prevost deviated from the path to Mendel that had been followed by his older brothers and many other St. Mary’s boys. Instead, he left home for St. Augustine Seminary High School, also run by priests in the Order of St. Augustine, then went on to Villanova University, outside Philadelphia, for an undergraduate degree in math.
In 1977, he graduated, joined the Augustinians and began work toward his master of divinity degree at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park. According to the order, he also taught math part-time at Mendel and occasionally substituted as a physics teacher at St. Rita High School.
The newly ordained Rev. Prevost celebrated a Mass in his home parish, Lyons-Geary recalls.
Since taking his vows, though, Prevost has spent most of his career overseas. Following studies in Rome to get a doctorate in canon law, he was sent in 1985 to Peru as a missionary, community prior and professor.
Elevated to the Vatican
In 1999, he returned to Chicago as the Augustinian order’s leader of its Midwestern territory, which includes Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox and monasteries in the area. During his tenure, an Augustinian monastery allowed a priest from Providence who’d been found by church leaders to have abused young boys to live there.
The residence was near a Catholic school.
Prevost later faced criticism over his dealings with priests in Peru accused of sexual abuse.
From 2001 to 2013, Prevost was the order’s international leader, based in Rome.
Prevost returned to Peru and, after his elevation in 2014 to bishop, led the diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, for seven years.
Then, Pope Francis chose him for an influential post leading the Vatican’s office that selects and oversees bishops and also put him in charge of a Latin American affairs department. In addition to English and Spanish, Prevost is said to speak Italian, French and Portuguese.
“It’s probably a long shot that he’ll be chosen as pope,” says Doughney, Prevost’s former classmate. “But, if he is, I’ll know that this is someone who really has an agenda of kindness and compassion, just like our former pope.
“I’ve characterized him as incredibly kind and compassionate. I think about Robert as a compassionate soul. And so I’m happy for him. I’m thrilled for him.”
As for St. Mary’s, it remains vacant after a failed attempt to consolidate parishes in the area.
“Maybe,” says Neis, “it’ll be a shrine if he becomes pope.”