Pope Leo XIV’s ‘godly’ path from Chicago to the Vatican

For hundreds of years, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have been largely Italians till a cardinal from Poland was elected pope in 1978 after which succeeded by a German and an Argentine.

Now, for the primary time, the pope’s an American who has taken the title Leo XIV.

And he is from the South Aspect of Chicago, house of the beleaguered White Sox, the Daley political dynasty and, till they decamped for Washington and finally the White Home, Michelle and Barack Obama.

Leo, who has spent a lot of his profession ministering in Peru and main the Vatican’s highly effective workplace of bishops, was born Robert Francis Prevost on Sept. 14, 1955, at what was then known as Mercy Hospital, on the nook of South Prairie Avenue and thirty fourth Avenue.

However whereas Prevost made his debut in Chicago, his dad and mom and two older brothers have been already residing simply south of the sprawling metropolis in a working-class suburb known as Dolton.

House was a tidy brick home the Prevosts purchased new in 1949 on East 141st Place.

Prevost’s father, Louis Prevost, served within the Navy throughout World Battle II and labored as a superintendent of colleges within the south suburbs of Chicago.

The longer term pope’s mom, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was a librarian with a grasp’s diploma in training and two sisters who have been nuns.

However the focus of the household was St. Mary of the Assumption Parish on 137th Avenue, which was then a busy church and college that straddled the Chicago/Dolton border.

It was there that the Prevost household commonly attended mass, which again then was nonetheless in Latin. And it was there that his classmates realized that Robert was already working towards what he would at some point be preaching.

“We used to hope with our palms, you already know, our fingers pointing to heaven, and after a whilst you get uninterested in doing that, and also you simply need to fold them over,” former classmate Marianne Angarola, 69, advised the Chicago Solar-Instances. “Robert Prevost by no means folded his palms over. He was simply godly. Not in an in-your-face means. It was a part of his aura, like he was hand-selected, and he embraced it. And he wasn’t bizarre. He was good.”

Whereas many of the boys from St. Mary’s went on to native Catholic excessive faculties like Mendel School Prep, Prevost left house and attended St. Augustine Seminary Excessive College, a boarding faculty in Holland, Michigan, that was run by monks from the Order of St. Augustine.

Upon graduating, he headed east to Villanova College in Pennsylvania, a personal Catholic school, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in math in 1977. By then, he had discovered his calling, and in 1978 he formally joined the Order of St. Augustine.

4 years later, in June 1982, Prevost was ordained a priest after having studied theology at Catholic Theological Union of Chicago. Then he was off to Rome, the place he earned a doctorate in canon regulation from the Pontifical School of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1987. 

He returned to Chicago, however solely briefly, earlier than he was dispatched in 1985 to Peru, the place he served the order as a missionary and taught canon regulation within the diocesan seminary within the metropolis of Trujillo for 10 years.

By 1999, Prevost was again in Chicago and appointed chief of the Augustinian order’s Midwestern area, which he oversaw till 2010.

A part of his turf included Windfall Catholic Excessive College in New Lenox, and it was throughout his tenure that allegations surfaced that the college’s president, the Rev. Richard McGrath, had abused at the least one scholar and stored youngster pornography photographs on his telephone.

The Solar-Instances reported final June that the Augustinians paid a $2 million settlement to the abused scholar and that Prevost by no means defined why he didn’t take away McGrath from his publish. 

By 2014, Prevost was again in Peru after Pope Francis appointed him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo and later the bishop of Chiclayo.

However in Peru, he was as soon as once more accused of failing to research and punish a priest accused of sexually abusing three sisters from 2007 to 2015.

The Diocese of Chiclayo denied a cover-up, and Prevost has by no means been personally accused of abusing members of his flock.

The allegations additionally didn’t derail his rise by means of the ranks.

Francis promoted him to archbishop in January 2023 and made him a cardinal a yr later.

In public statements, Prevost typically echoed Francis with requires “reaching out to the poor, to the neediest, to these on the margins.”

However whereas Francis promoted better acceptance of LGBTQ individuals, Prevost in a 2012 took a much less tolerant tone in an deal with to a bunch of bishops, to whom he complained that Western tradition was fostering “sympathy for beliefs and practices which might be at odds with the gospel,” The New York Instances reported.

In the meantime, Prevost’s different job as the one that runs the workplace that helps determine who will likely be appointed a bishop made him a contender for the highest job on the Vatican, which he landed Thursday.

Talking in Spanish and Italian however not in English, Pope Leo stood on the balcony overlooking his cheering flock and thanked the pope who blazed the trail for him. He additionally laid out a imaginative and prescient of the long run that Francis would more than likely have applauded.

“We could be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges, that’s at all times open to obtain everybody — similar to on this sq., to welcome everybody, in charity, dialogue and love,” he stated.