The Making of an American Pope

Time​ Magazine

11 hours ago

Archivio GBB/Redux (3); Courtesy John Prevost (6); Courtesy The Midwest Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel (1)
'I'm ticked,' says John Prevost, the retired Midwestern high school principal who is now, abruptly and without warning, globally famous and in demand. 'I didn't want to be, but I'm so angry.' He's sitting at the table of Denise and Rob Utter, who have invited a bunch of people from their local Catholic parish, about 45 minutes south of Chicago, to talk about their friend and John's kid brother Bob, whom they have known for decades, over pizza. Sometimes they call him Father Bob. Occasionally they remember to call him by his new name, Pope Leo XIV, but it's unfamiliar to their tongue. One of the guests accidentally calls him Pope Pius.
It's probably not all fun and games to be the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people from very different cultures at a time when the Catholic Church is recovering from multiple scandals, riven from within, financially ensnarled, and, especially in the so-called developed nations, wrestling with a growing disinterest in the stuff it does best—ancient ritual, obligatory gathering, biblical exegesis. But it's also a teensy bit of a drag to be his brother.
Pope Leo XIV, 69, is the person to whom lots of people look when they want to come in contact with God. John Prevost, 71, is the person to whom they look when they want to reach the Pope. His mailbox is inundated. A local accounting firm sent him a 30-page pitch deck on how it would sort out the Vatican's finances. Another opportunist sent him two baseballs, asking for them to be forwarded to His Holiness, newly anointed as the world's most famous White Sox fan. 'Dear Mr. Prevost, please have your brother sign these baseballs,' the accompanying letter said, according to its recipient. 'You can keep one and run a fundraiser.' His mail carrier is sympathetic, advising him to hire someone to handle the paper blizzard.
It's not just mail. His phone (a landline) rings well into the night. One recent warm day, Prevost was watering his yard when he noticed people at his front door. It was congregants from a now shuttered church in Chicago, St. Adalbert's. 'They had a two-page letter to send to the Pope in the hopes that he will convince the Cardinal to reopen the church—and they were not going to give up,' he says. Even Hollywood is getting in on the act. Prevost has already had a showbiz publicist offer to represent him, and a journalist stop by post-interview to give him tips on what is imprudent to say on live TV—such as his imminent travel plans.
Prevost's travails are one of the many ripple effects of May 8, 2025, when the conclave made several types of history by handing the papal keys to a recently appointed American Cardinal. Robert Francis Prevost is not only the first Augustinian, the first modern missionary, and the first devotee of Peeps and Hostess Snoballs to occupy the Throne of St. Peter, he's also the first leader from a land where opportunism and entrepreneurship are admired only slightly less than the triune God. America is not used to having a local guy as the driving force of an institution with four times as much history and an even greater capacity to inspire fear and awe. But a deep dive into Pope Leo's education and background shows that either by divine intervention, wise choices, luck, or all three, his path made him uniquely prepared for steering through the choppy waters facing the ancient denomination he now leads. Photograph courtesy of John Prevost
As recently as three months ago, it was a truth universally acknowledged that there was not going to be a Pope from the U.S. anytime soon. The Americans were too dominant elsewhere, too loud, too confident, too greedy, too obsessed with individual liberties. They venerated the new and the shiny, preferring novel and homegrown faiths to the traditions of Europe or Asia. They were more concerned with LGBTQ rights and the ordination of women than the plight of the poor and dispossessed.
But if ever there were going to be an American Pope, people could have predicted he'd come from the Midwest. 'He's Midwestern nice,' says Father Paul Galetto, the pastor of St. Paul church in Philadelphia, of the fellow Augustinian he has known since his 20s. 'He listens to you. He's pleasant. He's not going to jump in the middle of your conversation, tell you you're wrong. That's a great advantage for him.'
Even the much prevailed-upon John Prevost can't stay ticked for long. A few evenings before our dinner party, someone left a package at his doorstep. It was a Wordle cap. (He plays Wordle with his Vatican-based brother every day; he in English, the Pope in Italian.) 'And then here comes the card: 'Dear John, in a world where there are so many evil people right now, you are a breath of fresh air, thank you,'' says Prevost. ''We so appreciate your sense of humor and your kind words.' And that changed my attitude. People are watching me, so I'd better not be crabby.'
It was clear from very early on where the youngest of Mildred and Louis Prevost's three sons was heading. 'The only thing that was in question until eighth grade was, would it be an order priest, or would it be a diocesan priest?' says John. (The former belongs to a brotherhood, while the latter serves a church.) 'Nothing was forced on him. That was his decision to make.' The family were eager Catholics: his mother, a school librarian, sang in the choir, as did young Robert. They had relatives who were nuns. Before he became a high school principal and district superintendent, Louis, who served in the Navy during World War II, had considered being a priest. His sons' career choices mirrored their father's: Louis, the oldest, named after his dad, went into the Navy. John was a principal of Catholic high schools. And Robert took the path his father might have taken. Robert Prevost, the youngest of three boys, showed a devotion to the church from a young age. Archivio GBB/Redux Prevost's childhood home in Dolton, Ill., where a current neighbor sometimes plays sermons through loudspeakers Jamie Kelter Davis—The New York Times/Redux
Apart from his devotion to the church, and the fact that study came easily to him, Robert was a regular kid, riding his bike around the streets of the south Chicago working-class suburb of Dolton by day, playing flashlight tag by night, and occasionally squeezing the glowing goo out of fireflies and wiping it on an older brother. It didn't seem odd that he occasionally set up a pretend Communion table on the ironing board and gave his family play sacraments. John confirms that even while very young, Robert had a reputation among the neighbors, with one elderly lady telling him as they played in the yard that he'd be Pope one day.
When young men showed an inclination toward entering the priesthood in 1967 Chicago—a city that was Catholic enough that locals identified themselves by their parish rather than their neighborhood—they'd be visited by representatives of the various orders, football-scout style, to see where they might fit in. 'I remember sitting around a table each time someone was coming, and they would come, and then everyone would ask questions,' says John Prevost. 'We had to sit there and be nice.' The vocational director who persuaded eighth-grade Robert to give the Augustinians a spin was Dudley Day, a Catholic of the old school, whose views were conservative enough that he later parted ways with his local church over a disagreement about modernization. Prevost with his oldest brother Louis (left) in Holland, Mich. Courtesy John Prevost
St. Augustine, the minor seminary in Holland, Mich., where Robert Prevost completed his secondary education, was the kind of place that sorted the priests from the merely pious. About 50 boys were accepted every year, and about a dozen graduated four years later. 'It was tough; it was rigorous,' says Father Becket Franks, who was the year below the future Pope at school. Students were up at 6 a.m. and had scheduled activities until about 8:30 p.m., when they had a few hours of free time before retiring to a large dormitory lined with beds. There were three Masses a day and a lot of time in close quarters together.
Prevost, who was co-valedictorian and yearbook editor among other accolades, had a reputation for being a good person to turn to for help with homework, especially math or languages. 'He was the smartest person I think we ever met,' says Franks, who is now a Benedictine monk and chaplain. 'He had mastered French by the middle of high school.' Students were required to undertake certain extracurricular activities (Prevost was in the choir with Franks—both sing tenor—and played tennis) and to keep up their academic performance, but mostly the school's focus was how to live in community. 'Everything that we went through at St. Augustine Seminary High School prepared Robert Prevost for his position,' says Franks. 'Not just education but dealing with people and learning patience and how to behave.' A yearbook photo from St. Mary of the Assumption, the local parish school Prevost attended Archivio GBB/Redux Prevost as a student at Villanova University in Philadelphia, where he got a B.S. in mathematics Courtesy John Prevost
From Michigan, Prevost went to Villanova, the Augustinian university just outside Philadelphia. It was in Pennsylvania that he really developed his love of driving, which according to two contemporaries, he would do while reading a book. He and three friends once asked Father Bill Sullivan, who oversaw would-be friars, if they could drive to a church dance in Chicago—some 12 hours away—and be back the following afternoon. In January. Their request was declined. 'He just was an easy guy to be with,' says Sullivan, now a parochial vicar at St. Jude's, the church the Utters belong to in New Lenox, Ill. 'He made friends. People really listened to him.' Prevost majored in math and minored in philosophy, but it was pretty much the end of his study of anything not directly related to his faith. In September 1977, shortly after he finished his coursework at Villanova, he made the first round of vows to join the Augustinian order.
At 22, Robert Prevost was committing his life to an establishment in the midst of generational change. The Catholic Church of his parents had been altered profoundly by the Second Vatican Council, which released a series of reports in the mid-'60s, loosening up some of the church's strictures and establishing a series of new procedures and rules that allowed, among other things, Mass to be said in languages that were not Latin and pastoral care for those who are divorced. One result of these changes was a call for a new style of urban and more ecumenical Catholic university. Prevost joined an institution founded on those principles.
The Catholic Theological Union (CTU), housed in the former Aragon Hotel, was a decade old when Prevost arrived. Two dozen or so men's orders studied there, as well as women and laypeople, and the school had female professors and a rabbi on staff. What it didn't have was any students on the way to becoming diocesan priests. (They trained in the more palatial Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago.) The mix of cultures, genders, and orders and the shedding of hierarchy—professors were called by their first names—made it an exciting place to be. 'It was, in a certain sense, the best of what religious community can become,' says Sister Dianne Bergant, 88, who taught there for 45 years.
Bergant marveled at the opportunities she was given. 'This is going to sound like an exaggeration, but I do not ever remember being minimized by my male colleagues because I was a woman,' she says. 'Women were considered to be theologians in the same way as men.' She had Prevost in two classes, Old Testament and Pentateuch, and doesn't remember him at all but can tell from her class notes that he did well and always turned in his assignments on time. Each student had a spiritual director, and Prevost chose Sister Lyn Osiek, who also supervised his theological-reflection class. 'Calm and steady,' says Osiek. 'Those are the two words that I would say about him. It was just like nothing fazed him. He was really a person who was at peace with himself.' Prevost giving his first blessing after ordination to his mother. Courtesy John Prevost
At the end of the day students from a religious order went back to the houses of their communities where professors from the order also lived and dined and prayed with them. About a dozen Augustinians lived together in the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park, with others coming and going. While it's safe to say it was collegial, it was not one of the party houses. 'Sometimes we were invited up to different parts of the building where the other communities were to celebrate various things,' says Prevost's classmate Father Mark Francis, now superior general of the Viatorians. 'The Passionists, for example, would always have a Kentucky Derby Day. And the Precious Blood always had kegs of beer.' Bergant confirms this: 'Those Precious Blood men put on good parties.'
(The St. John Stone Friary has been in the news over the years because a priest accused of abusing at least 13 minors was allowed to move in there in 2000. A victims' group filed a complaint with the Vatican in March, alleging that Prevost 'endangered the safety' of children by allowing the priest to live near an elementary school. 'To our knowledge, Pope Leo XIV has acted in accordance with Church policies in every abuse case,' the Archdiocese of Chicago said in a statement in May, 'and has consistently expressed his compassion for survivors of this crime and sin.' A lawyer for Midwest Augustinians has suggested the location was selected because of the supervision the priest would receive. The complaint also alleged that Prevost failed to properly handle three women's claims of sexual abuse while he was bishop in Peru in 2022; the Vatican has said Prevost followed church protocol and sent the results of an initial investigation to Rome. The Vatican closed its own investigation in August 2023, though the diocese later reopened the case.)
The scholarship at CTU was both rigorous and progressive. One of the required classes, on Christology, had two versions, one taught by a professor trained by Edward Schillebeeckx, the respected Belgian theologian who promulgated the idea that the true role of the Christian was not to ascribe to a certain set of beliefs but to right injustice as Jesus did, and the other trained by the equally respected German theologian Karl Rahner, whose emphasis was on the mystical nature of Christ and thus of all humans.
'We were not trained in a very doctrinaire, rigid kind of theology,' says Francis, who served a stint as CTU's president. 'One of the strengths of the school was the missiological part. The question of religion and culture was very important in terms of how we have to recalibrate things if you're moving from one group to another, one culture to another.' Many of CTU's graduates became missionaries, including one of Prevost's contemporaries, Ezechiele Ramin, who was murdered in 1985 in Brazil as he tried to broker peace between the corporate landowners and the local landless farmers. There is a campaign to have him beatified.
Bishop Daniel Turley, who lived in the Augustinian friary for a few months in the late '70s, remembers Prevost as being particularly committed to the idea of doing missionary work. In general, the Augustinians are considered a missionary order who teach and preach. St. Augustine left Europe and moved to North Africa with a handful of other devotees to live out a life saturated by their beliefs while also absorbed in the needs of their neighbors. Augustinians don't stay in one place like the Benedictines, but move around, bringing their gifts to different places, but always among other Augustinians. The current Pope once described the order as 'brothers and friends whose lives and witness truly make a difference.'
Wherever Prevost has gone, he has been among men who had been trained as he was and committed to sharing everything. Even when he was a Cardinal with his own papal apartment, he went to the Augustinian curia for meals and Mass every day, and once a week to play tennis; he dined there at least twice in the early weeks of his papacy. 'He was very interested in what I was doing in Peru,' says Turley, who worked there for 52 years. While other students were heading to their rooms to study, Prevost wanted to talk about what people in Turley's diocese needed. 'Of all of them, he was the most community minded,' says Turley.
If Prevost spent most of his first quarter-century less than 800 miles from his home, the decades that followed would take him quite a bit farther. After he graduated from CTU and took his solemn vows in 1981, he was invited to study canon law in Rome. 'Americans had stopped going to study in Rome,' says Galetto, who was one of the first to return. 'We thought American theology was better, more modern. It wasn't based on patristics, but more on psychology and sociology.' When he arrived with Robert Dodaro, his co-valedictorian from way back at high school, neither speaking Italian, Galetto was their guide. John Paul II, now St. John Paul II, had just been elected, a youngish Polish Pope emerging at the same time as Lech Walesa's Polish trade union, Solidarity. 'There was this electric feel,' says Galetto. 'Large crowds were coming to the audiences.'
While Prevost was studying a historic and doctrinaire subject, essentially the legal framework for the Catholic Church's operations, at the Angelicum, a 440-year-old school where John Paul II had also studied, he was surrounded by the excitement of a new era. The Augustinian house was across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican, and it was filled with men from around the world. Galetto remembers Prevost really enjoying the global nature of the brotherhood. 'When you study in Rome, you realize that the church is really universal,' says Galetto. 'Many of the Augustinians who are in the United States, we just think that the American problems are the church's problems, but there's so much more than that.' Prevost greets Pope John Paul II Courtesy The Midwest Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel
Because of his legal expertise, Prevost was asked to become personal secretary to a bishop in Chulucanas in northern Peru. But he arrived in the aftermath of deadly El Niño floods and set to work helping rebuild the region. 'When you're a missionary, you just learn how to do everything, from electronics to auto mechanics,' said then Cardinal Prevost during a visit to St. Jude's last year. It was not a seamless process. There might still not have been an American Pope if one of Prevost's Augustinian brethren hadn't saved him from being electrocuted with a well-aimed tackle on a roof after the young missionary picked up the wrong two wires.
While Pope Leo owes his formal education almost solely to the northern hemisphere, much of his shaping as a practitioner occurred in Peru. 'Those are the life experiences that give you life to continue on, that nourish you,' says Turley, who was Prevost's superior when he arrived. 'As a young priest, to go through that, and see how beautiful it is, how poor people can be, and yet all of the goodness and the power of people when they come together, and the wonderful things that they can do if you start breaking down prejudices and division.' Prevost said as much at St. Jude's: 'The part of ministry that most shaped my life is Peru.'
After a decade in South America, it must have been quite an adjustment to take on the role of head of his home Augustinian province, which stretches throughout the Midwest and into Canada. One of his duties as provincial prior was to minister to Augustinian schools, and he was called in to help out St. Rita of Cascia High School in Chicago. The students have a retreat every year, and the school likes to invite priests who are unfamiliar to the boys to hear confession so they don't feel awkward. In 2000, Prevost was one of those priests. 'I had gone to confession several times before, but it was like two minutes, let me get out of here as quickly as I can,' says Patrick 'PJ' McCarthy. 'But this was more of just a conversation.' The two sat knee to knee in the darkened room and talked about underage drinking and sibling rivalry, among other things. 'He was not judging me, and he was just very open,' recalls McCarthy. Mike Stawski, who was on the retreat as a student leader, noticed right away that Prevost was different from most priests. 'What was so fascinating about him was that almost immediately, we forgot that he wasn't with us the whole time. He was so welcoming, so caring for what we were doing.'
After two years, Prevost was voted in as the head, or prior general, of all Augustinians, based again in Rome. He traveled a lot, encouraging the other 2,800 or so Augustinian friars around the world. But priors general can serve only two terms, and in 2013, Prevost found himself back in Chicago, back at CTU, helping guide Augustinians in training, work usually done by much younger men. 'It's like having the CEO of an international organization retire from being CEO, but yet be employed by the organization for passing out mail,' says Bergant, the Old Testament scholar.
If Prevost felt it was a comedown, he said nothing to his friends. That's the Father Bob the folks of New Lenox talk about, never too busy or too big for his community. After Father Mike Schweifler had a heart transplant on Easter in 2005, the women of St. Jude's who were looking after him struggled to get his brethren to visit. But Prevost, who was prior general, came several times. 'Sometimes he was just on a stopover and he drove here from O'Hare for a few hours or a few minutes,' says Denise Utter. 'And then he'd go back to O'Hare, because he had a connecting flight.' Pope Leo in a White Sox cap given to him by a newlywed couple in St. Peter's Square on June 11 Filippo Monteforte—AFP/Getty Images
At the same time Prevost's friends want to make clear that he's not overly reverent. He laughed when they showed him Saturday Night Live 's 'Weekend Update' segment about his election on YouTube. When they get together for pizza (he favors mushroom and sausage), 'we mostly don't talk about faith-based things at all,' says Utter. Lisa Salva and her husband Rich visited Prevost in Rome in 2011, and he took them through a back door to St. Peter's Basilica for Mass so that they emerged right under the altar. 'When I walked up that spiral staircase, I looked up and I went, 'Jesus Christ!'' recalls Salva. 'And he goes, 'That's a good reaction.'' The current Pope also knows his way around a good clean Midwestern joke, at least according to his brother. One of the last jokes he told Pope Francis was about going to the doctor because his arm hurt in two places, says John Prevost. 'And the Pope said, 'Really? What did the doctors say?' And Bob said, 'Doctors told me: Don't go to those places.''
Prevost's return to Chicago also turned out to be something of a stopover, because in 2014, Francis, whom Prevost had met when the late Pontiff was still Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, asked him to return to Peru, this time as bishop of Chiclayo, a large metropolis in the north. The diocese was dominated by clerics who were members of Opus Dei, a very conservative sect of Catholicism, and Prevost, who had to become a Peruvian citizen to become a bishop, was charged with moving it back to the middle. 'So you had some resistance to the new bishop,' says Turley. 'But those [Opus Dei adherents] who were in control quickly lost control, because the people really wanted someone who was open and welcoming.'
The challenges weren't only from within the church. 'Right after he became a bishop, we had the tremendous problem of Venezuela,' says Turley, who oversaw the Catholic Church's response to the 1.5 million asylum seekers accepted into Peru after the Venezuelan economy and civil society began to collapse in 2014. They needed housing, jobs, and medical help. 'One of the best bishops to work with in dealing with migrants was none other than Bishop Robert Prevost,' says Turley. 'His diocese was so well organized to take care of them.'
The combination of Prevost's formal but reformist education and long fieldwork among people with very little but each other to insulate them from hardship was perhaps what drew Pope Francis to swiftly raise his standing at the Vatican as the Pontiff saw the dying of the light. In Hope, Francis' last book, he wrote that for the church to grow, it had to focus less on conversion and more on attracting people through the way Christians lived, and therefore for high-ranking church officials, 'the title of 'servant'—here in the sense of ministry—should obscure that of 'eminence.'' Pope Leo riding through St. Peter's Square in his popemobile before his first Mass as Pope on May 18, 2025. Andrew Medichini—AP
In 2023, Prevost was made a Cardinal and moved back to Vatican City, working in successively more prominent roles, until the announcement of his election in May. 'He's been formed in the kind of church that is forward-thinking, missionary in its outlook, globally aware, and then, especially in Peru, very deeply formed by his accompaniment of people who were the poorest,' says Sister Barbara Reid, the current president of CTU. 'You can hear it in everything he says.'
For many, it can be hard to believe the Catholic Church has any relevance today. All those ornate empty buildings with men in robes waving smoke around elderly congregants, preaching homilies with references to activities as quaint as shepherding and sowing, and praying to dead saints whose miracles are now forgotten or considered dubious. The first American Pope officially comes from the Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, which seems almost as fantastical as coming from the Gladden Fields of Middle Earth. The church of his childhood, St. Mary of the Assumption, is abandoned, its stained-glass windows (one displaying the papal keys) uncontemplated.
But every time one expression of faith dies, a new one seems to rise up offering something more in keeping with the needs of the era. History records the first Pope Leo as an adept diplomat; he's credited with persuading Attila the Hun not to sack Rome. The current Pope Leo has already offered Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a place to negotiate. In the wake of the U.S. bombing of Iran, he urged world leaders to 'stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.'
When Galetto saw his fellow Augustinian step onto the balcony, he paused for a moment to reflect on the mysterious ways of the universe. 'We started at the same place 40 years ago. Here I am stapling papers together at a parish because we're having a prayer service,' he says, 'and he's going to be talking to Putin about the war in Ukraine. God had a plan for him, and God had a plan for me.'
Bob Prevost might never climb behind the wheel of a car again. But Pope Leo might be able to drive something. Already inquiries about becoming an Augustinian novitiate are up fivefold from last year. Augustinian websites have been flooded with traffic. And another type of visitor has been showing up on John Prevost's doorstep: people who feel that an American Pope is a sign. 'Because of my brother, they are going back to the church,' says the older Prevost. 'They say, 'I've been away for a long time. And I'd like to come back.''