The Choice of Pope Leo XIV: His Early Life, Career, and the Catholic Reform
The story of Robert Francis Prevost is at once commonplace and fascinating, even uncanny, precisely because it is so very much the story of a mid-century boy of the midwestern United States, born into a middle-class family that lived in the middle of a postwar suburban development. The times of the Prevost family in Robert’s generation were heady, indeed. There was explosive economic growth, and also social unrest as intolerable racial divisions began finally to sear the national conscience after centuries of lacerating the nation in body and soul. Around the world, Europe was experiencing the Cold War—think of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968—while peoples and political societies throughout the global south were agitating for independence from their erstwhile European colonial rulers. Catholic culture in the United States was approaching its zenith, driven in part by the baby boom and in part by the prosperity the second, third, and fourth generations of Catholic immigrants were achieving.
The world was restless—nothing new—but getting at once smaller and very much larger. The space race was expanding the horizon of human endeavor, while the arms race was making the specter of global nuclear annihilation to loom large on it. Morals were shifting in ways that made it appear as if nothing were stable, even as though there were no truth abiding. It was an age increasingly in need of hearing Saint Augustine’s sublime encapsulation of the human condition: “You made us unto yourself, and until it should rest in you, our heart is restless.” It was an age increasingly incapable of hearing it.
(Extra-) Ordinary Beginnings
Robert Francis Prevost entered the world on 14 September 1955 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of three boys born to Louis Marius Prevost and Mildred Agnes Prevost (née Martinez). Robert’s parents were Chicago natives and lifelong Chicagoans. Both parents were professionally involved in education and devoted to the upbuilding of civic life. Their family’s history, not only in their generation, is inextricably interwoven with the history of their native city and their native land.
Passion for education and dedication to the work of forming young minds and hearts were also something the Prevost boys learned from their parents. “Our whole family was geared toward education,” Louis told The New York Times. In a conversation with Good Morning America on May 9, 2025, John Prevost recounted how Rob, the youngest of the three Prevost boys, gave sign of his vocation from a very early age. “[Rob] would take our mom’s ironing board,” John said, “[he would] cover it with a tablecloth, and we would go to Mass.” Catholic children have been playing at Mass for centuries, probably since Apostolic times.
Catholic boys in the 1960s still considered the priesthood almost as a matter of course, but for Robert Prevost, the childhood games were not mere fancy. They were practice. “Some of us had considered [the priesthood],” John Doughey—a schoolmate at St. Mary of the Assumption parish school in Dolton, from which they both graduated in 1969—told the Chicago Sun-Times. Doughey offered his remarks to the Sun-Times for a piece about then-Cardinal Prevost—“From the south suburbs to helping choose the next pope”—published May 3, 2025, ahead of the conclave that elected him. “It was kind of a fantasy for most young men,” Doughey told the Sun-Times. “For him I think it was true calling,” Doughey said, “even as a young teenager, he knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go.”
Robert Francis Prevost OSA, however, recounted how very keenly he experienced the tension of existence, the drama of vocational discernment, in his own person. In a July 2023 interview with Italy’s leading Tg1 news program of the RAI network (roughly Italy’s version of the BBC), Prevost recounted how he had brought his disquiet over his vocation to his father. “I remember sometimes speaking with my father,” Prevost said, “who wasn’t exactly a spiritual director,” but was an educator. “That was his life,” Prevost also said during the interview. In those conversations, Prevost said, they would speak “of very concrete things, like the doubts that can come to a young person: ‘Maybe it’s better to leave this life, to get married, to have children—to have a normal life, let’s say—like the one I saw in my own family,” he recalled.
“With his experience, he would speak of things like—let’s say—intimacy between him and my mother, and how important it was,” Prevost said, “but also about how very important is closeness to Christ in a vocation to the priesthood—to know Jesus, to know the love of God in life—how important it is for all Christians.” Prevost said he had heard such and similar “a hundred times” from priests and those responsible for his priestly and religious formation, “but, when my father said it, in a very human but deeply meaningful way, I said [to myself]: Here is something to which I need to listen.”
The life of Pope Leo XIV has been one that has seen its share of turbulence, on three continents—North America, South America, and Europe—at different times and in different ways. There was the disruption of Catholic life in the United States during the heady days of the Vatican Council II, which unfolded within a sociocultural context of profound upheaval in U.S. society. There was the poverty and protracted political violence of Peru into which his Order of Saint Augustine missioned him when he was still a young priest. There was the global disquiet of sociopolitical, cultural, and institutional unsettlement in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, at the outset of which he came into the worldwide leadership of the Augustinians.
Before he received his first missionary assignment to Peru, before he was Fr. Prevost or even officially an Augustinian, Prevost had faced and outfaced another form of cultural and social disruption and disintegration. Prevost had performed admirably during his four years of secondary school (1969 – 1973) at St. Augustine Seminary High School in Laketown Township, MI, a two-hour drive from Chicago along and up the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. While at St. Augustine, Prevost was a powerful presence who earned both accolades and respect. “[Prevost] was the valedictorian,” schoolmate Bob Schick told CBS Boston-affiliate WBZ News for a May 9, 2025 piece. “He was the student body president. He was in charge of speech and debate,” Schick told WBZ.
Schick, who was a freshman at St. Augustine in 1977 when Prevost was a senior, described the upperclassman as a fellow with a capacious aptitude for friendship. “[Y]ou had a lot of freshman kids there who were really scared to be away from home,” Schick said, “and Bob [Prevost] was one of the guys, one of the seniors, who took people under his wing.”
Prevost’s class, however, would shrink from several dozen to only thirteen members by the time he graduated. The shrinking of the class was of a piece with the shrinking Catholic footprint in the United States. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Those friendships and others sustained Prevost through the tumult of the second half of the twentieth century and into the furor of the twenty-first. That service—the quiet kind behind the scenes and away from the limelight, left not undone but well begun and for others to carry forward—came from a spirit of care that recognizes how civilizations come and go, while human souls are made for eternity. It also taught him at once never to shrink from duty in the moment and to take the long view of things. There is something profoundly Catholic (and catholic) about that.
***
Prior General, Bishop, Cardinal
Fr. Robert Francis Prevost was elected prior general of the Order of Saint Augustine for the first time on September 14, 2001—his forty-sixth birthday—in Rome, while people in the city and around the globe watched with horror the scenes unfolding in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, knowing that the world had changed but not even dimly understanding how or how much. This author was a young graduate student in Rome at the time and remembers the bottomless anguish of those awful days. The sheer psychological pressure of being saddled with any global leadership role under such circumstances, even one without the care of souls, is almost too terrible to imagine. Prevost would serve two terms as prior general, during which he travelled extensively, visiting Augustinian works and houses throughout the world. As the head of a global religious order dedicated to missionary work, Prevost had to manage human and material resources on a scale comparable to that of multinational commercial concerns.
As prior general, Fr. Prevost had to know—and to trust—people of every temper and disposition, from vastly different backgrounds, facing myriad daily challenges and trying circumstances various in kind and degree. He had to be able to identify potential leaders and give them the chances they would need in order to grow, knowing that sometimes they would fail. He needed to know which problems required his address and he needed to know how to deal with those problems. He needed to know which problems he could leave to others, and he needed to know to whom he should leave them. He needed to know how to put the best available people in place, how to get them the resources they need, and how then to get out of their way.
After two terms in the leadership of his Order of Saint Augustine, Fr. Prevost was ready to go home—to Chicago, that is—and to rest. According to one widely publicized account, Pope Francis gave him to believe, for a little while, that he would be able to do just that. Francis had accepted Prevost’s invitation to come celebrate the opening Mass of the Augustinians’ general chapter on August 28, 2013—Saint Augustine of Hippo’s feast day and a solemnity for Augustinians—at which Prevost’s successor would be elected. Prevost recalled Francis saying to him: “Now, rest.” Prevost recalled saying, “Thank you, Holy Father, I hope to rest,” in reply.
On November 3, 2014, however, Francis named Prevost bishop and apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo in northern Peru. Bishop Prevost would remain in Chiclayo roughly eight years, during which time he cultivated many friendships and working relationships.
“We saw a bishop who put on a helmet, boots, and went out to meet people, very close, very, very humble with everyone,” Caritas worker Janinna Sesa told NPR’s Morning Edition on May 9, 2025, “from those who held important positions to the most humble of people.”
Pope Francis called him to Rome to serve as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, naming him to the leadership of the powerful curial department at the end of January 2023. Then-Archbishop (soon thereafter to be Cardinal) Prevost moved to Rome and got to work. He impressed his staff with his ability to listen with careful attention and to keep meetings properly focused. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of other participants, Prevost would correct course and move matters in the right direction. Insiders noted how Prevost could accomplish these course-corrections often without the meandering and loquacious parties ever becoming the wiser. Shortly after Prevost arrived in Rome and the Vatican to take up work in his new office, however, a story of serious oversight failure broke.
In the year 2000, when then-Fr. Prevost was provincial head of the Augustinians in Chicago, he allowed Fr. James Ray, an accused abuser-priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, to reside in an Augustinian house—the St. John Stone Friary—situated near an elementary school. Ray, who has never been convicted and is not on any list of sex offenders maintained by Illinois civil government, had allegations against him and had been on restricted ministry for nearly a decade. Reportedly, the Archdiocese of Chicago made note of the restrictions on Ray when requesting hospitality for him in the Augustinians’ house. Prevost apparently neither alerted the school, nor caused the school to be alerted. Subsequent reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times (which broke the story) quoted Chicago archdiocesan records as incorrectly asserting “there was no school in the immediate area,” but the Augustinians ought to have known better and, in any case, ought to have said something.
The episode with Ray was a serious failure—there is no mistaking it—one that put people in danger. It is also the case that the episode occurred some two years before the crisis of abuse and cover-up erupted in Boston, with the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative reportage. The Boston scandal quickly engulfed the whole United States and then spread around the world. The crisis of abuse and cover-up—a crisis of clerical and hierarchical leadership culture—is one of very long standing, which persists in the present.
Fr. Hans Zollner SJ, widely considered the Church’s leading expert on safeguarding, has said this generation will not live to see the end of it. “This will not be over in our lifetime,” Zollner told an audience at Fordham University in March of 2019, “at least in countries where they have not yet started to talk about it.” The crisis certainly was with the Church in the year 2000, as then Fr. Prevost’s failure in leadership when he was provincial superior amply though microcosmically attests. The scandal of the crisis—the awareness the scandal compelled—was dim on the horizon at best.
Going into the conclave that elected Robert Francis Prevost OSA as Pope Leo XIV, observers across the spectrum of opinion in the Church knew that every prospective candidate’s leadership record on abuse and cover-up would be a subject of scrutiny. Many observers wondered whether there would be anyone found in the College with an unblemished record. The answer, most agreed, was a qualified “No.” The election of Prevost—a man with an imperfect record, who had already faced significant public scrutiny—may have been in fact a sign of awakening—much-belated, so the more welcome—among the cardinals. Their choice of a man, whose skeletons were already out of the closet, was arguably indicative of their awareness not only that their choice would face scrutiny, whoever he was, but that he would have no excuse when the time came for leadership on the crucial issue.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform (Bloomsbury, 2025). All rights reserved.
