West St. Paul pastor recalls spending the summer of 1980 in Minnesota with a friend — Pope Leo XIV

Yahoo

16-05-2025

In the summer of 1980, the man now known as Pope Leo XIV saw the new movie 'The Blues Brothers' with a Lutheran friend at Roseville 4, a now-demolished theater on Larpenteur Avenue.
They also ate at the Black Forest Inn in Minneapolis and spent time at Luther Seminary, where friend John Snider lived. The Rev. Snider is now the senior pastor at St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in West St. Paul, and during that summer of 1980, he, Bob Prevost, as the pope was then known, and three others served together in a clinical pastoral education group at Abbott Northwestern hospital in Minneapolis.
'I'd say, 'Bob, let's get together,' but it was kind of bouncing around a bit,' Snider said. 'He finally said, 'If we're going to be friends, we have to make a commitment.' It was like, oh, yeah. So we did. We did a lot of things all summer, and I just think of that as one of those characteristics that's true to him — people count, and he makes a commitment to be there with you.'
Then, as now, many seminary students are required to complete clinical pastoral education at medical centers or hospitals, almost like an internship where they gain skills on 'the relational, conversational, emotional side of the job,' Snider said.
The men were in their early 20s; this was before they were ordained by their respective religious bodies: Snider at Luther Seminary in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Prevost within the Augustinian order of the Roman Catholic church. While Snider lived at the Seminary in St. Paul, Prevost lived on the hospital campus in Minneapolis.
'I'll tell you the other thing: To have known someone, we were 22 and 23 or maybe 24, and to see this guy now being under a microscope, and lots of people either fawning on him or dogging him for this and that is like, what?!' Snider said. 'But truthfully, I don't worry about him. He's not in it to be Pope; he's in it to serve.'
About a week before the papal conclave was set to begin earlier this month to select a new pope, Snider reached out to his old friend — not knowing he would soon become pope, of course, but wishing him well as a voting member of the College of Cardinals.
'He responded, 'Love to you and Polly and thanks for your friendship through the years. It's all in God's hands. Blessings, Bob,'' Snider said.
Snider is set to retire from St. Stephen's on Sunday, May 18 — the same day as Leo XIV's inaugural mass in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City.
The Roseville 4 theater, which had been on the corner of Larpenteur and Fernwood Street since the 1970s, closed in 2008 and was torn down to make room for an adjacent grocery store expansion.
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As far as Snider knows, Prevost has not been back to Minnesota since that summer, but Snider visited his friend in Rome in 2010 when the now-pope was serving as the global head of the Order of Saint Augustine.
No sitting popes have visited Minnesota; Prevost's 1980 summer work makes him only the second pope in history known to have visited Minnesota before his papacy. Before becoming Pope Pius XII, then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli briefly stopped in St. Paul on a national tour in 1936.
'All my friends are like, 'So when's your next trip to Rome?'' Snider said, laughing. 'But I'm not sure what a Pope's vacation schedule is like! How many days off do you think the Pope gets to request?'