VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The New Yorker
January 5, 2026
By Paul Elie
Will Pope Leo XIV follow the progressive example of his predecessor or chart a more moderate course? His work in Chicago and Peru may shed light on his approach.
In Peru every August, throngs of Catholics set out on foot from the remote northern town of Motupe, bound for a cliffside chapel that houses the Cross of Chalpon. The cross, made of guayacán wood and ringed with precious metals, stands about eight feet tall and is believed to have been discovered, as if by a miracle, in a nearby cave in 1868. The ascent takes about an hour, and venders along the way sell religious images and replicas of the cross, as well as roasted corn and Inca Kola. A highlight of the pilgrimage comes when a procession bears the cross downhill, to the church of San Julián, in Motupe’s main plaza. The next day, the Bishop of Chiclayo, the regional capital, leads a Mass for a congregation that fills the square. A brass band plays and helicopters scatter rose petals over the faithful. For decades, the presiding bishop was a member of Opus Dei, a traditionalist movement, founded in Spain in 1928, that has thrived in Latin America. In 2014, however, Pope Francis appointed Robert Prevost, an Augustinian priest from Chicago who had spent a dozen years as a missionary in Peru, to the post.
Prevost himself, of course, is now the Pope; he was elected on May 8th and took the name Leo XIV. Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts. His election was striking but not altogether surprising: he was on many Vatican watchers’ lists and, since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Leo—who in recent years worked closely with Pope Francis as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican office—seems likely to carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society with a steadiness that will complement the Argentinean prelate’s improvisatory style.
The public was instantly captivated by Prevost’s background. He was called “the first American Pope,” “the pan-American Pope” (as a bishop, he was required to take Peruvian citizenship), and “the three-world Pope” (to account for his time in Rome). Following accounts that his mother’s family was from New Orleans and his maternal grandfather, born in Haiti, was listed as Black in the 1900 census, he was hailed as “the Black Pope”—until reports of his Sicilian, French, Québécois, Spanish, Cuban, and Creole ancestry brought him the tag “the immigrant Pope.”
The press descended on his childhood home, a modest brick bungalow in Dolton, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and on his boyhood church there, St. Mary of the Assumption, which was shuttered in 2011, its rose window cracked and weeds sprouting near its cornerstone. His elder brother John, a retired Catholic-school principal, confirmed that Leo was a White Sox fan and liked the thin-crust pizza at Aurelio’s; Sox fans started showing up at home games dressed in papal garb, and Aurelio’s introduced a pie called the Poperoni. His eldest brother, Louis, Jr., a retired Navy man, described himself as a “MAGA type” and “Rob” as “much more liberal,” but suggested that he would lead the Papacy “down the middle.”
The summer had the feel of a soft opening to Leo’s pontificate, in part because many papal events had been arranged before he was elected. In Rome, he arrived by helicopter at the Jubilee of Youth, which drew about a million young Catholics to a park south of the city, and he presided over the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen-ager known as “God’s influencer,” who, before his death, from leukemia, used digital media to promote Catholic values. Leo took part in a Vatican conference on the climate emergency, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guest speaker, called him an “action hero” because, as soon as he became Pope, he “ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on the buildings.” He met with people who had a wide range of viewpoints, including Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcaster; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who presented him with the Prevost family tree; Father James Martin, a Jesuit who advocates “building bridges” with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, a “rad-trad” advocate for the restoration of the Latin Mass.
[PHOTO: Since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Photograph by Camillo Pasquarelli for The New Yorker]
Then, on September 30th, a news correspondent for EWTN, a Catholic broadcaster, asked Leo about a controversy in Chicago: the archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, planned to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin for his long support of migrants’ rights. Traditionalists pointed out that Durbin, a Democrat, has also long supported abortion rights. The Pope replied, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but ‘I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they are very complex issues. I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would ask first and foremost that there’d be greater respect for one another.”
Some saw those remarks as a rebuke of the White House (“Holy Smackdown,” the Daily Beast announced, “Pope Leo Trashes Trump’s Signature Policy”), others as Leo giving cover to Cardinal Cupich. (Because of the controversy, Durbin decided not to accept the award.) The website Where Peter Is, which focusses on the Papacy, saw it as a sign of “Leo’s unifying, de-escalation-oriented priorities.” It was, in other words, an instance of Leo going about the Papacy the way his brother said he would—playing it down the middle.
“I’m just a month and a half into this new mission,” Leo told a friend in an e-mail in July. A man who a decade ago was presiding over pilgrimages in a remote Peruvian town is now leading a global religion with more than a billion followers, and will have to contend with rising authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, a Church divided between progressives and conservatives, clashes over immigration, grinding wars, and a climate crisis rapidly growing more intense. The Pope’s life, since he entered a seminary high school in 1969, as he turned fourteen, has been a series of assignments, each with clear objectives. The question now is: What is the papal mission, as he sees it?
In 1955, when Richard J. Daley, who went to Mass every morning, became the mayor of Chicago, there were 1.7 million Catholics among the city’s population of some four million people. Irish, Italian, German, and Polish communities each worshipped—in Latin—at their own churches, often within blocks of one another. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the archdiocese, led by Cardinal George Mundelein, had been allied with the Democratic Party and labor unions, and had promoted social activism through groups such as Young Christian Workers and the Catholic Interracial Council. During the postwar years, though, tens of thousands of white parishioners chose to move to new enclaves in the city and the suburbs as, owing to the Great Migration, the Black population, long sequestered on the South Side, grew and expanded into other neighborhoods.
Robert Prevost’s parents—Louis Prevost, from the South Side, and Mildred Martinez, from the North Side—met while pursuing graduate degrees in education at DePaul, a Catholic university in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. After marrying, they moved to Dolton, a mostly white suburb that was thriving along with the nearby steel mills and refineries. He worked as a school principal and superintendent; she was a librarian at Mendel Catholic, a high school run by the Augustinian order, a community founded in 1244 and named for St. Augustine, a fourth-century Bishop of Hippo and the author of “Confessions.”
The Prevosts raised their three sons in Dolton; Rob was born there in 1955. The boys rode bikes and played baseball with the kids on the block, John told reporters. They knew that their mother’s father had been born in Haiti, he said, but “we never really talked about it.” They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at six-thirty Mass before school, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. A Spanish Augustinian named Fidel Rodriguez, whom their father had met through a local charity effort involving migrant workers, sometimes came to supper, dressed in the black habit worn by members of the order. “He had quite an impact on me,” Robert Prevost said, years later. “I never forgot it, in terms of his sense of humor, his generosity, his willingness to serve these people who were, if you will, kind of down and out, and just the way he reached out to them.” Rob practiced celebrating the Mass by draping a sheet over an ironing board in the basement and consecrating Necco wafers. “He was going to be a priest,” John said. “Period. End of discussion.”
The Second Vatican Council, which took place from 1962 to 1965, under Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, urged Catholics to engage frankly with the modern world, not to fear or avoid it. The Council shifted the Mass from Latin to local languages and softened the idea that “outside the Church there is no salvation.” It also promoted a progressive approach to race relations. Pope Paul met with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, and the next year he chose John Cody, who had excommunicated several segregationists while serving as Archbishop of New Orleans, to be the new Archbishop of Chicago. In the spring of 1966, after King arrived to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement—focussed on easing discrimination in housing and employment—dozens of priests and nuns joined the marches, which set many of their parishioners against them. Mobs threw stones, bricks, and bottles at King, who said he’d “never seen anything so hostile and so hateful.”
But some clergy resisted change. Father Francis X. Lawlor, who taught at St. Rita of Cascia, an Augustinian high school on the Southwest Side, organized white Catholics into block clubs meant to “hold the line” against integration. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, a Chicago native whom Pope Francis named as the first African American Archbishop of Washington, D.C., remembered taking city buses from the South Side to a seminary on the Southwest Side, “through some very, very tough neighborhoods” for Blacks, he told me. He and his classmates often went as a group from the seminary to a church nearby, he said. “I, as a young Black teen-ager, was walking those streets knowing that, if I were not accompanied by a phalanx of white kids, I might have been the victim of some very hostile, if not physical, violence.”
Father Dudley Day, an Augustinian whom Mildred Prevost knew through her work at Mendel, had the role of reaching out to young men who might be interested in joining the order. He visited families and described the Augustinian life with gusto: teaching, preaching, and brotherhood; a thriving community at Villanova University, near Philadelphia; and a headquarters near St. Peter’s, in Rome. The order had just established a missionary outpost in Chulucanas, an ancient town in northern Peru, led by Bishop John McNabb, who had recently been the principal of Mendel. And it had a high-school seminary up in Michigan, a grand place on a lakefront property. One evening, when Rob was in the eighth grade, Father Day visited the Prevosts in Dolton. Evidently, Rob was persuaded: in the fall of 1969, at a moment of dramatic social change, he enrolled at St. Augustine Seminary High School in Holland, Michigan, two hours northeast of Chicago.
St. Augustine’s followed a regimen of Mass, classes, prayer, and spiritual direction, but it was a boys’ high school all the same. Students had to play two intramural sports; Prevost played football, basketball, and tennis. He took four years of Latin, joined the debate club and the student council, acted in skits, and was named to the National Honor Society. The yearbook—Prevost was the editor—shows him in a dress shirt and striped slacks, a slight young man with thick black hair and sideburns, singing enthusiastically with a group of students, one of whom plays an accordion.
Still, Prevost wasn’t always certain about the priesthood. “Sometimes I talked to my father about the doubts I had, like thinking, Maybe it would be better to leave this life and get married; I want to have children, a normal life,” he recalled in 2024. He wasn’t alone in his questioning: some ten thousand American men left the priesthood during the social revolutions of the nineteen-sixties and seventies; forty-five boys entered St. Augustine’s in 1969, but just thirteen graduated.
A consequence of this attrition was that Prevost stood out. When he entered Villanova, as a pre-novice, he was already an obvious prospect for leadership in the order. Villanova was a smaller, more local school then. It had become fully coeducational only in 1968, and most students were commuters. Today it is a men’s-basketball powerhouse—three current players for the Knicks went there—but at that time the team was dismal and played home games at the Palestra, the University of Pennsylvania’s gym. Prevost majored in mathematics—useful for a future administrator—complemented by a heavy load of Kant, Hegel, and Sartre. With another pre-novice and a female classmate, in response to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, Prevost founded Villanovans for Life. Father Paul Galetto, who is now a parish priest in Philadelphia, said of Prevost, “There was no whoa, but he was a solid guy. He spoke when spoken to. Always cordial and nice, and not trying to impress.” Prevost graduated in 1977, spent a year with Augustinians in St. Louis, and returned to Chicago.
There, in December, 1977, a group of progressive Catholics had issued what they called “A Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern,” urging the Church to keep pursuing the ideals and reforms of Vatican II. A vital center of progressive energy was the Catholic Theological Union, in Hyde Park, where Prevost pursued a master’s in divinity while also resuming his study of Latin at the University of Chicago. Though just a short drive from where he’d grown up, Hyde Park was a distinctly different place, thanks mainly to the presence of the university. C.T.U. trained clergy, nuns, and seminarians, from two dozen Catholic orders, half of them from Latin America and Africa, as well as laypeople. It promoted Vatican II’s approach to the role of the Church in the developing world: no longer would missionaries seek souls in need of saving. Instead, they would make the Church present through “inculturation”—by fitting themselves, and Catholicism, into the local scene, in a kind of religious variation on the South Side community organizer Saul Alinsky’s emphasis on identifying and prioritizing people’s immediate needs.
The curriculum included “A Theology of Liberation,” a book by the European-trained Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, published in 1971. The work contained Marxist-inflected social analysis and calls to action and was based, he wrote, “on the gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America.” Prevost lived at the St. John Stone Friary, where Father Daniel Turley, an Augustinian twelve years his senior, was on sabbatical from the mission in Chulucanas. Turley told him about the town, in the foothills of the Andes, with its mission church and several dozen outlying villages, reached by dirt roads. He also described the Augustinians’ pastoral approach, which had many points in common with the work of Gutiérrez, and suggested that Prevost go to Peru to see for himself.
In August, 1978, Pope Paul VI died, and Cardinal Albino Luciani, the Patriarch of Venice, was elected his successor, taking the name John Paul. A month later, he died in his sleep, and a second conclave elected Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Kraków, who took the name John Paul II. His dynamism, relative youth (he was fifty-eight), and support of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland initially led many American Catholics to see him as a progressive. They were wrong: the Soviet domination of Poland made him detest Marxist-tinged movements, which, in his view, included liberation theology. In January, 1979, while on his first foreign trip, John Paul made a stop in Puebla, Mexico, to address CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano y Caribeño), an association of bishops who espoused “a preferential option for the poor”—the belief that God favors the poor and so the Church should, too. Without naming liberation theology, the Pope derided “the conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, the subversive of Nazareth.” His remarks were the first strike in a long campaign against the new Latin American theology.
That October, John Paul travelled to six cities in the United States—the first such tour for a Pope—and spent a day and a half in Chicago. He celebrated Mass at Holy Name Cathedral (Luciano Pavarotti, who was in town to perform at the Lyric Opera, sang “Ave Maria”), then led a three-hour Mass in Grant Park, which was attended by more than a million people.
[PHOTO: Pope Leo XIV has indicated that his papal mission will carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society. Photograph by Camillo Pasquarelli for the New Yorker]
Prevost met John Paul two years later. After completing his master’s at C.T.U., he was sent to study in Rome, one of two Augustinians from the order’s Midwest province chosen to go—“the more intelligent ones,” Father William Lego, who has known Prevost since 1966, told me. They lived at St. Monica’s, a residence next to the order’s headquarters, the Augustinianum, which adjoins St. Peter’s Square. On May 13, 1981, the Pope was being driven through the square in an open Fiat when shots were fired, hitting him twice. An Augustinian found the assailant’s gun on the cobblestones and turned it in. John Paul spent some time recuperating, then paid the Augustinians a visit. A photograph shows Prevost, in a black habit, keen-eyed and smiling, shaking hands with the Pope.
Prevost was ordained the next June. He intended to stay in Rome and began to study canon law—the rules for the internal governance of the Church—but he was drawn to Peru by circumstance. In the fall of 1983, after a prolonged drought, torrential rains fell for three months in Chulucanas, destroying roads, bridges, and two thousand homes. The next March, four priests were returning to the town from Lima when their car overturned; two were killed, two seriously injured. Prevost was asked if he would join the mission, and he said yes. Last fall, speaking to the American journalist Elise Ann Allen for a biography that will be published in the U.S. in April—in the only lengthy interview he has given thus far—Prevost recalled his first impression of Chulucanas. He told her, “There was a part of me that was looking around and saying, ‘Lord, where have you brought me?’ ” He contracted typhoid fever, which, he said, “was a very significant point for me, because it was, like, ‘You’ve dealt with the sickness, you see what the needs are around here.’ The order, the Augustinians, the Church is saying, ‘We need you here, jump in.’ ” In 2024, in a wide-ranging public conversation at his brother John’s parish, St. Jude, in New Lenox, Illinois, Prevost said, “I think the part of ministry that most shaped my life was Peru.”
At first, he helped get food and other aid to the residents of flood-ravaged villages, and used his canon-law knowledge to assist Bishop McNabb. Then, in 1988, he was tasked with founding an Augustinian community near Trujillo, a city on the Pacific Coast that had more than four hundred thousand people. The objective was clear: to draw Peruvians to the order at a time when few young American men were joining it. “If you’re a true missionary, you want to put yourself out of a job,” Father Lego told me. “You are helping the Church to reproduce.” Five mornings a week, Prevost was behind the wheel of a minibus, taking a dozen students to the archdiocesan seminary in the city center, where he taught canon law and other subjects. On weekends, he served in two Augustinian parishes in poor parts of Trujillo.
Leo told Allen that during his time in Peru he was not “extreme” and was drawn to Gandhi’s ideas of peaceful protest. He praised Gutiérrez’s approach, which, he said, “is about starting to look through the eyes of the poor and with the poor to understand how God is in and among us,” and he noted that labelling it Marxist is “erroneous and incomplete.” He also recalled becoming aware of conflicting perspectives in Peru, from progressive to ultraconservative—that some considered Gutiérrez a “great theologian and others were embarrassed that he was Peruvian.” According to Father John Lydon, who lived in the community, the Augustinians in Trujillo “were almost all favorable to the perspective and person of Gutiérrez. All of us embraced the preferential option for the poor.”
Throughout the nineteen-eighties, however, John Paul had sought to reclaim a degree of autonomy that Vatican II had granted to the regional bishops’ conferences, particularly in Latin America. His rigorist doctrinal chief, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—the future Benedict XVI—had moved to restrict Gutiérrez and other liberation theologians, leading to a standoff with CELAM, which had a long history with him. The Vatican resolved the issue in Peru by replacing progressive bishops with conservative ones, until all but one of the country’s seven archdioceses were led by men who supported Ratzinger’s program.
A number of the new bishops came from the ranks of Opus Dei, which had been cultivating a presence in the country for decades. John Paul had elevated the movement to a “personal prelature” (answerable only to him) and accelerated the canonization of its founder, the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, who died in 1975. Opus Dei, which is rooted in pre-Vatican II ritual and rigor, had flourished in Franco’s Spain, establishing a business school at the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, whose graduates gained power in finance and government. In the nineteen-eighties, the movement sought to replicate that strategy in the U.S. (Antonin Scalia, who was named to the Supreme Court in 1986, reportedly took part in retreats organized by the movement) and in Latin America. Opus Dei was firmly on the side of the continent’s moneyed élites, and its relationship with John Paul took shape as one of mutual loyalty.
The Catholic right’s insistence on order in Peru was directly challenged by the chaos on the ground. Peruvians call the nineteen-eighties the Lost Decade: inflation swelled to seven thousand per cent under President Alan García, whose government was weakened by corruption, strikes, and power and water shortages. Sendero Luminoso, an avowed Marxist-Maoist insurgency, sought to overthrow the government and lead a “shining path” for the liberation of Peru’s Indigenous peoples. Founded in 1969 by Abimael Guzmán, who taught philosophy at a university in Ayacucho, Sendero first took power in villages, and then shifted its efforts to Lima and other cities, prompting a fierce counter-insurgency, carried out by the military, the police, and government-funded local militias. Sendero bombed schools, police headquarters, government offices, houses, cars, and entire city blocks, and it executed opponents by hanging and by firing squad. In the course of a dozen years, beginning in 1980, tens of thousands of people were killed or disappeared in the conflict.
[PHOTO: Robert Prevost met Pope John Paul II in Rome in the early nineteen-eighties. Photograph courtesy the Midwest Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel]
In the 1990 Presidential election, Alberto Fujimori, a son of immigrant shopkeepers from Japan, defeated Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s preëminent novelist. In April, 1992, Fujimori asserted full autocratic powers and drastically stepped up the counter-insurgency operation. That September, Guzmán and his companion, Elena Iparraguirre, were captured in Lima; a secret military tribunal sentenced them to life in prison, but the fighting went on. Sendero threatened the Augustinians in Trujillo and killed three priests in a neighboring diocese; sent armed columns to the diocese of Chulucanas, and likely planted a bomb that exploded near the mission church and one found outside the bishop’s residence.
Prevost was offered police protection but refused it. One morning, when he was driving the minibus, some soldiers ordered him to stop. They said that the seminarians on the bus were needed for the government’s counter-insurgency forces. Prevost refused to hand them over, saying, “These young men are going to be priests, they cannot go to the barracks,” Father Ramiro Castillo, who was on the bus, told the Times. The soldiers yielded, and Prevost drove on.
In the early nineteen-nineties, the Midwest province in Chicago asked Father Lydon to develop an “exit plan” for the Augustinians in Peru. He told me, “I consulted with the members of the mission, and one of the principal ones was Bob Prevost” (as he was known outside his family). Together, they came up with a different idea. Lydon said, “Our focus was What would Jesus do? What would Augustine say? And the answer to both of these was to stay. I wrote the first draft in consultation with Bob, and then it was presented to everyone. Out of eighteen or twenty Augustinians, only one decided to leave.” The violence finally subsided, and Fujimori held power until 2000, when he fled Peru for Japan amid allegations of corruption and human-rights abuses.
Prevost himself had left Peru in 1999, called back to Chicago to head the Midwest province. Catholicism in Chicago had changed dramatically since his years at C.T.U. In Cook County, where the city is situated, the proportion of Catholics had dropped below forty per cent for the first time in fifty years. Mendel Catholic High School had closed. Barack Obama, in his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” offered a grim sketch of South Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer during the late eighties: “Eight Catholic parishes flung across several neighborhoods, all with black congregations but led by white priests” who “had seen their sermons of brotherhood and goodwill trampled under the stampede of white flight, their efforts at recruiting new members met with suspicion by the dark faces—mostly Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal—now surrounding their churches.” And clerical sexual abuse was a problem in Chicago, as elsewhere, albeit one that was still largely out of public view.
In February, 2001, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on a situation from the previous year involving the Augustinians in Hyde Park. Cardinal Francis George had placed Father James Ray, a diocesan priest who had been removed from parish work in 1990 following multiple accusations of sexual misconduct with minors, at the St. John Stone Friary. (In May of last year, Ray told the paper, “I can’t change the past. I don’t necessarily want to defend myself either. On a scale of one to ten, I was wrong, but it was a one or maybe a half even. It wasn’t a child—was a young adult, over twenty.”) A subordinate to the cardinal recommended the placement in a memo, noting that “there is no school in the immediate area,” but there was: St. Thomas the Apostle, on the next block. According to another memo, the placement depended “upon the Provincial’s acceptance,” which would imply that Prevost signed off on it. In June, 2002, after the Boston Globe’s reporting on clerical sexual abuse prompted scrutiny of the Catholic Church across the U.S., the archdiocese reviewed the placements of accused priests, and Ray was told to move out.
By then, Prevost was back in Rome. He had been elected as the leader of the Augustinians worldwide on September 14, 2001, his forty-sixth birthday. He settled again at their headquarters near St. Peter’s and took a role in the Union of Superiors General, an association that brings together some two hundred leaders of Catholic religious orders of men twice a year in Rome. He grew friendly with two others who participated: Father Mark Francis, a Chicagoan who had been his classmate at C.T.U., went on to serve as its president, and is now a professor emeritus, and Father Joseph Tobin, from Detroit, who is now the Archbishop of Newark and a cardinal, and who jokingly refers to the union as “the Teamsters of Rome.”
[[PHOTO: Prevost and his two brothers were raised in Dolton, a mostly white suburb of Chicago. They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at early Mass, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. Photograph by Jim Vondruska / Getty]
Prevost’s challenge was to transform the Augustinians from an order composed of European and North American men to one representative of the fifty countries in which it was present. So he travelled. (“We would see each other on airplanes,” Father Francis said.) He visited each of the Augustinian communities every third year. (He was reëlected in 2007.) At every stop, he said Mass, ate the local dishes, donned regional dress for a photograph with the novices, and met with other clerics to learn the situation on the ground.
One such meeting proved to be crucial for Prevost and for the future direction of the Church. In August, 2004, he travelled to Argentina to dedicate a new Augustinian library, and said Mass with the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit and a cardinal. Eight months later, John Paul II died, and the papal conclave elected as his successor Joseph Ratzinger, who took the name Benedict XVI; Bergoglio, who at the time was thought to be a conservative, was the runner-up. In August, 2006, Prevost returned to Buenos Aires and celebrated Mass again with Bergoglio.
The two men were developing a working relationship, though each had his own priorities. In 2023, Prevost told a group of Peruvian bishops, “Let’s just say that when Cardinal Bergoglio and I met we weren’t always in agreement.” Prevost had planned to send a priest in Buenos Aires to a new assignment out of the city. Bergoglio asked him to hold off, but Prevost insisted. As he recounted the next year, he said, “I understand, Your Eminence, but he’s got to do something else.” He added, “And I was told that he wasn’t happy about that—as can happen, you know.”
Prevost kept up acquaintanceships in Chicago during those years. “He has had an uncanny knack of showing up at significant moments in our lives,” Father Tony Pizzo, an Augustinian who has known Prevost since both attended Villanova, told me. “He came to both my mom’s and my dad’s funerals.” In 2005, when the White Sox reached the World Series for the first time since 1917, Prevost attended Game One. A TV camera panning the crowd randomly fixed on him: a middle-aged Chicagoan wearing his team’s pin-striped jersey. He also kept up with local politics; in 2011, after Governor Pat Quinn signed a law abolishing capital punishment in Illinois, Prevost posted a note to the Governor’s website: “I applaud your vision and your understanding of this very complex matter. You have my full support!”
In February, 2013, Benedict XVI unexpectedly resigned, citing ill health, and Bergoglio was elected Pope, taking the name of Francis. Prevost later told the Peruvian bishops, “I said to some of my brothers, ‘Well, that’s very good, and, thank God, I’ll never be a bishop’ ”—an allusion to his tiff with Bergoglio in Buenos Aires. But, for a cleric of his age, fifty-seven, and with his experience, appointment as a bishop was a logical next step. The question was where—in the U.S., which has about two hundred dioceses, or in Peru, which has about twenty?
The Augustinians were set to begin their annual meeting in Rome that August. “And, sort of as a whim—this has never happened in the history of the order—I said to the general counsel, let’s write a letter to Pope Francis and see if he will come and celebrate the opening Eucharist,” Prevost said in 2024. “So I write this letter to him, and he said yes. And then it was, like, ‘Oh, my God, now what do we do? The Pope is coming!’ ”
[PHOTO: Prevost (left) with his family on the occasion of his eldest brother, Louis,’s First Communion, circa 1958.Photograph from Archivio GBB / Alamy]
A video shows Francis’s arrival at the Basilica of Sant’Agostino, in the Campo Marzio: he steps out of a car as a crowd of admirers surges behind a barricade. He finally reaches the church door, where Prevost awaits. “Come sta?” Prevost asks the new Pope, and the two men, beaming, shake hands vigorously. They spoke again after the Mass, and the Pope brought up an “incident” involving a minor dispute with a Vatican official, in which, Prevost later said, “I intervened sort of in his favor.” Francis told him, “I’ll never forget what you did.” Prevost replied, “That’s all right, Holy Father, you forget it if you like.” Another Augustinian who was with them mentioned that Prevost’s second term had ended, and he would soon be back in Chicago. “Now rest,” the Pope counselled him.
Francis had a definite idea of the qualities he sought in bishops, and in the clergy more generally. Shortly after his election, he addressed them directly, saying, “This I ask you: Be shepherds, with the ‘smell of the sheep.’ Make it real, as shepherds among your flock.” He was already acting to counter decades of doctrinaire appointments made by John Paul and Benedict. In 2013, several men affiliated with Opus Dei led dioceses or archdioceses in Peru. One of them was the Archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne. Appointed in 1999, Cipriani had sought to assert control over the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, widely viewed as a redoubt of liberation theology. (Gutiérrez had taught there in the nineteen-sixties.) Cipriani, the Guardian reported in 2012, had “the support of conservative groups in Peru who fear the university has been overrun by professors with liberal views toward homosexuality and abortion.” That year, the Vatican created a controversy by forbidding the university to use the word “Catholic” in its name.
Another was the Bishop of Chiclayo, Jesús Moliné Labarte. He and his predecessor, also affiliated with Opus Dei, had led the diocese since 1968. Moliné would soon reach the retirement age of seventy-five. “The theory was that Francis had a ‘clinical eye’ regarding Opus Dei,” a cleric with long experience of the movement in Peru told me. “He wanted to see if he could break Opus Dei’s stranglehold on Chiclayo, this small place, as an experiment.” The appointment of a new man who had no ties to the movement would send a sign that it no longer enjoyed papal favor. Father Francis put it to me plainly: “Pope Francis appointed Prevost as Bishop of Chiclayo to offset the Opus Dei bishop there.”
The Dicastery for Bishops organizes such appointments, via the Vatican’s ambassador to the country—the nuncio. In 2014, the nuncio to Peru was James Green, a Philadelphian whom Prevost had come to know in Rome. In an interview with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s newspaper, in May, Green said, “I was back in Rome for a while for meetings and speaking with Pope Francis.” He added, “I mentioned to him that I was thinking about Father Prevost to be Bishop of Chiclayo, and he knew Father Prevost because of meetings about South America that they had had over the years.”
Prevost was in the U.S. that November, when his appointment was made public. Two weeks later, he joined a procession at Holy Name Cathedral, in the Loop, as Blase Cupich, a progressive, was installed as the Archbishop of Chicago—the clearest sign yet that Francis was remaking the Church leadership. Five weeks after that, Prevost was prostrate on the floor of the neoclassical-style Catedral de Santa María, in Chiclayo, his arms spread to form a cross, as Green pronounced over him a litany of saints through the centuries—one American bishop ordaining another, as twenty Peruvian bishops looked on.
“Bob really went all in as a missionary bishop in Chiclayo,” Father Francis told me. He urged pastors to entrust laypeople, especially women, with everyday responsibilities in their parishes; established a shelter for displaced and homeless women and children; and broke ground at a community garden in a blighted neighborhood. In his spare time, he repaired used cars (sometimes going to YouTube for fix-it videos), and then gave them to parishes in need. On Sundays, he hosted pancake breakfasts in a cathedral refectory, where any priest could find him at the griddle, spatula in hand, telling stories from his travels.
[PHOTO: Pope Francis appointed Prevost the head of the Dicastery for Bishops in January, 2023. He was named a cardinal that July. Photograph from Vatican Pool / Getty]
“So many priests invited him to their parishes—and he tried to accept every invitation,” Father Jorge Millán, then the rector of the cathedral, told me. Yolanda Díaz, an advocate for the poor who had studied with Gustavo Gutiérrez, said, “He didn’t just send aid. He came himself.” Those efforts, rooted in the Vatican II models of communal social action that Prevost had learned at C.T.U., served to counter Opus Dei. The movement had adherents among the student body and on the faculty at the Catholic University in Chiclayo, which has about ten thousand students, and the cathedral boasted an enormous portrait of Josemaria Escrivá, Opus Dei’s sainted founder.
Prevost took a “prudent” approach, his successor in Chiclayo, Bishop Edinson Edgardo Farfán Córdova, told me. He celebrated an annual Mass in memory of Escrivá. At the pancake breakfasts, Opus Dei priests mixed with other priests, and Prevost got to know the prominent locals who were mainstays of the movement. “He was very clever that way—one of his tools is that he doesn’t seem radical,” Alejandro Céspedes García, an editor at La República, a daily newspaper in Lima, said. Father Francis told me, “His first priority is always to bring people together. His instinct is to kill them with kindness, rather than to go at them.”
In Chiclayo, Prevost faced a challenge involving a different movement. This was the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, which was founded in 1971 in Lima, and aimed to create a community, especially involving young people, that emulated the closely supervised life of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. In 2015, the journalist Paola Ugaz and a former member of the community, Pedro Salinas, wrote “Half Monks, Half Soldiers,” a book that reported allegations of kidnapping, assault, and sexual abuse of young adults by the community’s founder, Luis Fernando Figari, and four other members. The Vatican began an inquiry, led by Archbishop Joseph Tobin. When he travelled to Lima in 2016, Prevost met him there, making the sixteen-hour drive from Chiclayo in a pickup truck. Tobin told me, “We sat and drank coffee and had a long chat. I was trying to get the temperature of things and his advice, too.”
Prevost was becoming a bishop of consequence. In January, 2018, Pope Francis travelled to Peru and celebrated an open-air Mass in Trujillo; Prevost took part, wearing aviator sunglasses along with his vestments. The Pope appointed him an adviser to the office for bishops, and then, in January, 2023, the head of the office, now called the Dicastery for Bishops. The naming of the head of a small remote diocese to the post was unusual, but Prevost himself later said that Francis “wanted a missionary. He wanted someone from outside.”
Prevost took up his new role in Rome after Easter of that year. Most Saturdays he had a working lunch with Francis, whose health was declining. Prevost was named a cardinal that July, as was expected for the head of a Vatican department. Unexpectedly, he was chosen to lead a procession of the new cardinals into St. Peter’s, who normally enter alphabetically by surname. He moved into a flat in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, a short walk from Casa Santa Marta, a modest Vatican guesthouse where the Pope had chosen to live (rather than in the Apostolic Palace). Prevost readily acclimated to the executive class at the Vatican, yet he usually dressed in a black suit and a Roman collar instead of a bishop’s tailored cassock and cape—he, too, chose to live simply.
The Catholic right in the U.S. had set itself against Francis throughout his pontificate, seeing him as soft on doctrine, hostile to capitalism, and anti-American. The commentator George Weigel wrote a short book outlining the qualities conservatives wanted in the next Pope, and, in 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, arranged for copies to be sent to all the cardinals who were expected to vote in the next conclave. Francis, for his part, subjected the Church’s right wing to closer scrutiny by the Vatican. In November, 2023, he removed the Bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland—who had, in a post on Twitter, accused the Pope “of undermining the Deposit of Faith”—after an investigation conducted by the Dicastery for Bishops. Francis and Prevost met on the morning the decision was announced.
The ongoing investigation into Sodalitium Christianae Vitae intensified the same year, when the Vatican sent two cardinals on a “special mission” to Peru. In 2024, it expelled Figari, the Vatican news agency reported, “due to accusations of physical, psychological, and sexual violence, including against minors.” (Figari has always maintained his innocence, and CNN reported last January that Figari’s lawyer said that he “has not been convicted in a court of law for the allegations.”) The Vatican then expelled ten other members. Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, the co-authors of the book that contained the allegations, publicly thanked Pope Francis for helping to call the movement to account, and thanked Prevost, too.
[PHOTO: Prevost became the Bishop of Chiclayo in 2014. “I think the part of ministry that most shaped my life was Peru,” he says. Photograph from ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters]
Then a matter from when Prevost was the Bishop of Chiclayo resurfaced. Three sisters from a Peruvian family alleged that they had been sexually abused as minors by two priests of the diocese. According to a recent report by the Times, the Vatican said that “Bishop Prevost followed church protocol after the women went to him with their abuse claims, conducting an initial investigation and sending his findings to Rome.” But one of the sisters in particular has since expressed dissatisfaction with the handling of the matter.
As Pope Francis’s health faltered, the issue figured in the thumbnail biographies of his prospective successors assembled by media outlets from the Times to the traditionalist website CatholicVote, and advocates for survivors of clergy abuse have continued to raise it. (The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.)
In early February, 2025, Francis had bronchitis; during events he had an aide read his statements aloud. Yet he involved himself in a conflict with American conservatives. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Vice-President J. D. Vance, a Catholic convert, had accused the U.S. bishops’ conference of operating charitable-works programs in order to make money via federal aid. (The bishops, in response, produced audited financial statements showing that they did not.) Vance had also sought, while speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, to justify the Trump Administration’s mass-deportation policy by evoking the ancient Catholic concept of ordo amoris, or order of love, and claiming that migrants figured way down on the list of people whom Americans should care about. Francis, in an open letter to the bishops, insisted otherwise, explaining that “the true ordo amoris” calls for “a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Gerard O’Connell, the Vatican correspondent for America, a Jesuit magazine, said in July that the letter was drafted over ten days by a number of people, one of whom was Prevost.
Francis spent six weeks in the hospital, then returned to work. On April 15th, he announced a decree dissolving Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. The same day, Prevost met with Mark O’Connor, an Australian Marist Brother. Prevost mentioned that he’d visited Francis in the hospital. Then, O’Connor told me, “he said, ‘J. D. Vance is trying to get to see the Pope.’ He brought it up with a raised eyebrow.”
Vance did get to see the Pope, stopping in at the Casa Santa Marta on Easter Sunday, on his way to a state visit to India. Francis died that night. “I was one of the last people to talk to him,” Vance told the press.
Pope Francis’s funeral was attended by representatives of more than a hundred and forty countries, including Donald Trump. When the President was asked if he favored a particular successor in the upcoming conclave, he said, “I’d like to be Pope.” He posted an image of himself dressed in papal vestments on Truth Social, which was then posted on the White House’s X account. The response was furious, but Trump claimed that “the Catholics loved it.” Francis had appointed about eighty per cent of the hundred and thirty-three cardinals who would vote, so it was likely that a successor would share his general outlook. But it was also thought that there might be a call for a European who would prize order and restraint. One prospect was Cardinal Péter Erdo, of Hungary, an ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is an ally of Trump.
“I can say with certainty, President Trump had zero bearing on the conclave. None. Not at any level—not even as a background reference,” Cardinal Robert McElroy, the current Archbishop of Washington, D.C., later said. On May 8th, after just four rounds of voting, white smoke above the Sistine Chapel signalled the election of a new Pope. At 7:23 p.m., Leo XIV stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s.
Subsequent reports have suggested that Prevost “checked all the boxes.” His life as an Augustinian made him attractive to the thirty-three cardinals from religious orders. His service at the Dicastery indicated a grasp of Vatican bureaucracy and reflected the trust Francis had placed in him. His work in Peru appealed to cardinals from countries where the Church is on the front lines of poverty, corruption, and violence—and it offset the conventional wisdom holding that the cardinals would be loath to create a beachhead for American power at the Vatican.
Remarkably, the man who spent much of his pre-papal life travelling the world didn’t leave Italy for more than six months after his election—the longest stretch of any new Pope since Paul VI. When he did leave, travelling to Turkey and Lebanon in late November, it was for a long-planned meeting of Christian leaders to mark the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, which produced the creed that Christians still profess on Sundays.
Leo has now nearly completed the events originally scheduled for Francis, and it’s time for him to start defining his own pontificate. He made his first major appointment on December 18th. To replace Cardinal Dolan, who turned seventy-five in February, as Archbishop of New York, Leo named Ronald A. Hicks, the Bishop of Joliet, Illinois, who, like himself, is a suburban Chicagoan who has worked among the poor in Latin America.
As to his own role, it may be that Leo will focus on being a “messenger of peace,” as he suggested in a press conference on the papal plane en route to Lebanon; the risk, as for any Pope, is that he may be left to utter well-intentioned platitudes while heads of state do as they please. He does seem determined to complete Francis’s effort to reclaim Vatican II, Latin American style. Leo’s first major document, “Dilexi Te,” released in October, made that clear. “I am convinced that the preferential option for the poor is a source of extraordinary renewal both for the Church and for society,” he wrote, “if we can only set ourselves free of our self-centeredness and open our ears to their cry.” What’s not clear, though, is how it would bear on pressing issues involving, among other things, artificial intelligence, gender transition, elective suicide, and the status of women in Catholicism—or what it would mean for the faith of ordinary people.
There is an issue on which Francis’s legacy and Leo’s experience converge with the everyday lives of millions of people: migration. Addressing diplomats in May, he said, “My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate.” John Paul II changed history by identifying the Church with the vast numbers of people subjugated by Soviet Communism. Leo could do that for migrants.
He’s already taking steps in that direction. On October 8th, as ice agents carried out Operation Midway Blitz, in Chicago, he urged the U.S. bishops to “speak to the issue.” When they did, in a message responding to a “climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” Leo said, “I would invite, especially all Catholics, but people of good will to listen carefully to what they said.” On November 19th, he met with J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who has acted in opposition to the ICE raids. Their meeting, Pritzker later told an NBC political reporter from Chicago, was focussed on migration. “He’s been reading the newspapers from Chicago,” the Governor said. “You can tell he has a great deal of concern for the plight of people who often don’t have someone who will stand up for them.” Pritzker asked Leo if he would come to Illinois—perhaps as an enticement, he brought along a four-pack of locally brewed Da Pope beer—and Leo, he said, was “optimistic” that a visit might happen soon.
The first American Pope returning to the United States on the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s founding is an appealing prospect. It points to the question that many American Catholics have: What does the Pope make of the United States now, when the President’s imperial sense of himself and his Administration is abetted by his Catholic Vice-President and five Catholic Supreme Court Justices? Does the Pope’s American identity oblige him to address his country’s circumstances?
The evidence of these first months is that Leo will do so, but in his own way, steadily and evenhandedly. Maybe that’s his mission: to be an American in a position of great power who is decent and humble—a no-drama Pope whose very ordinariness is his message. It’s a good look, at any rate. On the flight to Turkey, a reporter asked Leo if he had played Wordle that morning. He nodded and said, “Got it in three.” ♦
By Paul Elie
Published in the print edition of the January 12, 2026, issue, with the headline “The American Pope.”