Bridge BuilderHow Robert Prevost became Leo XIV
- Heal Our Church
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After burying Pope Francis, the cardinals chose another pope from the Americas to follow in his path, proving both that the “change of era” inaugurated by Francis is here to stay and that Latin America would still be a key source for the universal Church. Leo XIV is from the south suburbs of Chicago, “the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate,” as he put it to the Holy See ambassadors on May 16. He was referring to the decades he spent as a missionary and bishop in Peru. This is why the first U.S.-born pope is also the second from South America.
The quiet sixty-nine-year-old American, Robert Francis Prevost, friar of the Order of St. Augustine, slipped past the bookmakers and the pundits, quickly overtaking the Italian curial-establishment papabile, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to be elected after only four ballots, on the afternoon of the second day of the conclave. As they emerged from the conclave, the cardinals were delighted, as if they had stumbled on a pearl of great price. They spoke of the atmosphere inside: the lighthearted peace in the Sistine Chapel, the sense of fraternity and unity back at the Santa Marta. They remarked on the freedom from the pressures and distractions of the internet that allowed them to settle prayerfully on the one man among them whom they believe God had chosen. They described how moving it had been to watch Prevost as his name was read out, over and over. Joseph Tobin, cardinal archbishop of Newark, who knows the new pope well—having been head of the Redemptorists in Rome when Prevost was there as the prior general of the Augustinians—said he “took a look at Bob” and saw that “he had his head in his hands.” At that moment, Tobin prayed for Prevost, “because I couldn’t imagine what happens to a human being when you face something like that.” Yet once Prevost was elected—and on this the cardinals are unanimous—he was remarkably calm, wholly at peace. Over the next few days, Rome was struck by how effortlessly Prevost became Leo.
What convinced the 133 cardinals, it turned out, had not been a great speech, but rather the way Prevost carried himself: he was humble, direct, synodal, and pastoral. Prevost would be a pope in the tradition of Francis, yet different in ways the cardinals regarded as necessary. They sought three particular qualities in the next pope. First, they wanted someone with experience of the universality of today’s Church, someone familiar with its breadth and complexity. Second, they were looking for someone who could bring the peace of Christ to the divisions within the Church and in the world at large. Third, they needed someone who could govern firmly but also in a more collegial manner than Francis did. The more they got to know Prevost, the more he emerged as the one who fit that profile.
The young cardinal who heads the Filipino bishops’ conference, Pablo Virgilio David, said it was the pope as pontifex maximus, or “supreme bridge-builder,” that became a key topic for the cardinals in the ten days of private meetings prior to the conclave. He said Leo’s brief address from the loggia of St. Peter’s after his election was virtually a summary of their discussions. Peace was his theme, the disarming peace of Christ. Leo called for “a Church that builds bridges and encourages dialogue…a synodal Church.”
The next day, at Mass with the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, Leo dwelt on the great responsibility entrusted to Peter, his mission to bear witness in a world that often mocks or despises Christian faith. Back in 2013, Prevost thought he would escape being made a bishop; ten years later, he hadn’t wanted to leave behind his diocese in Peru when Francis asked him to head the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome. But in the end, he saw the move to Rome as “a new opportunity to live a dimension of my life, which simply was always answering ‘Yes’ when asked to do a service,” he told Vatican News at that time. “With this spirit, I ended my mission in Peru, after eight and a half years as a bishop and almost twenty years as a missionary, to begin a new one in Rome.”
And now, when Cardinal Parolin asked Cardinal Prevost if he accepted his election as pope, he gave another, even more radical “Yes.” In his homily the next day, Pope Leo described Peter being led in chains to Rome, “the place of his imminent sacrifice,” and said anyone in the Church who exercises a ministry of authority would recognize that journey. He, too, was being called now “to disappear so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that He may be known and glorified (cf. John 3:30).”
Did he ever sense that Francis had prepared his path? After his arrival in Rome in 2023 to head the Dicastery for Bishops (he had been a member since 2020), Prevost and Francis used to meet for two hours every Saturday morning in the Casa Santa Marta, where Francis lived. They discussed, of course, nominations for bishops, but also their vision of the Church. Prevost was one of Francis’s trusted negotiators with the German bishops over demands that arose from their controversial “Synodal Way” process. Francis came to rely on him more and more. He trusted Prevost’s decision-making and admired his way of working—the way he was able to reconcile different sides. Arthur Roche, the English cardinal who heads the Dicastery for Divine Worship, told me that Prevost was without doubt Francis’s “closest collaborator” in the Vatican during the past two years.
The time they spent together each week was deeply formative for Prevost, who was struck by Francis’s extraordinary capacity for discernment, as well as his radical commitment to God’s mercy. One morning, when the two were discussing clerical sex abuse, the pope said he wanted to show Prevost something. Francis left the room and returned with a picture from a Gothic cathedral in France which showed Judas taking his own life while Jesus cradled him in his arms. Was it really possible, Francis asked him, for God’s mercy to reach the worst of sinners? Telling this story in a talk to a Chicago-area parish in August of last year, Prevost described how Francis “struggles to express and live that dimension of the Gospel.” It was this focus that had led people to misunderstand or criticize the pope. Francis was convinced, Prevost said, that in a world full of mutual condemnation, “we need people, especially ministers, who can live and offer people the mercy, forgiveness, and healing of God.”
The quiet sixty-nine-year-old American, Robert Francis Prevost, friar of the Order of St. Augustine, slipped past the bookmakers and the pundits.
In early February, with his bronchitis worsening, Francis raised Prevost’s status within the College of Cardinals to bishop. It was done so discreetly that it went mostly unnoticed even by the Vatican press corps. Yet only a handful of others at the conclave were cardinal bishops, among them the two whom the media had dubbed the “frontrunner” papabili—Cardinals Parolin and Tagle. Was Francis sending a little posthumous hint that that list needed expanding?
The bond between Bergoglio and Prevost goes back to the first decade of the new millennium, when the American was based in Rome as prior general of the Augustinians. He spent half of each year of his twelve-year term visiting the three thousand Augustinian friars and their parishes and works across the world, extraordinary preparation for a pope of the global era, bringing him into contact with the Church in Africa, Asia, and the Near East, as well as in the Americas. He was often in Argentina, where the Augustinians have a vicariate with five parishes, five schools, and a formation house; and there he sat down with the famous Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires. The two men had a lot in common: both had been given major responsibilities in their religious orders from an early age.
Prevost recounts that, on his last visit with Archbishop Bergoglio, the two had a disagreement. Bergoglio wanted one of Prevost’s friars for some project or other in his archdiocese. Prevost said no; he had other work in mind for him. The archbishop was very unhappy about this, Prevost later learned, and so when Bergoglio was elected pope in March 2013, Prevost—who was coming to the end of his term as prior general—joked with his brother Augustinians that he could relax: this new pope would never make him a bishop. But when Francis met Prevost again in August, after celebrating Mass for the opening of the Augustinians’ general chapter, the pope effusively thanked him for his help with resolving a problem in Rome. “You can relax for now,” he said, thus hinting that he would soon be coming for him. The following year, when Prevost was back in Chicago, Francis made him apostolic administrator of Chiclayo, and a year later its bishop, an appointment for which Prevost needed Peruvian nationality.
Chiclayo is in Lambayeque, a region of northern Peru near Chulucanas and Trujillo, where Prevost missioned in his thirties and forties. There, he had been a formator of friars, a diocesan canon lawyer, and a parish priest. The 1.2 million-strong Diocese of Chiclayo needed a makeover: for more than thirty years, it had been run by Spanish Opus Dei bishops. For the next decade, Prevost would give it new direction, making it a diocese that modelled the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. Francis had “masterfully and concretely set forth” that ecclesiology in his 2013 teaching Evangelii gaudium, as Leo XIV reminded his fellow cardinals on May 10.
In that address, delivered two days after his election, Leo highlighted six “fundamental points” from Evangelii gaudium, which amount to a program for his pontificate. The first was the “primacy of Christ in proclamation.” (As he put it in a 2023 interview: “This comes first: to communicate the beauty of the faith, the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus. It means that we ourselves are living it and sharing this experience.”) The second was the “missionary conversion” of the whole Christian community, to enable others to encounter Christ in acts of mercy. The third, “growth in collegiality and synodality,” meant co-responsibility for the life and mission of the Church. (Synodality, he told people in Chiclayo, was a way for the Church to be closer to the people.) The fourth, “attention to the sensus fidei,” meant taking seriously the people of God as a believing, discerning subject, valuing their traditions and culture. The fifth, “loving care for the least and the rejected,” was the Church’s option for the poor, expressed in attention and concrete acts. The sixth and final point, “courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world,” meant a Church that confronts contemporary challenges rather than offering a refuge from them.
Anecdotes and photos from the pope’s time as bishop of Chiclayo reveal a pastor in the classic Latin American mold: approachable, informal, hands-on, close to the people. Chiclayanos fondly remember his affability and attentiveness as he engaged with civic authorities, mobilized funds, and created pastoral programs for prisoners, migrants, and flood victims. He turned up with oxygen tanks for makeshift treatment centers during Covid, and distributed food to flooded villages after Cyclone Yaku struck in early 2023. His homilies—short, joyful, and clarifying—focused on the primary proclamation of the gospel message and the transforming impact of God’s grace. Often, they would return to the significance of community, of becoming the pueblo that God’s love calls us to be.
But he is remembered most for his outstanding capacity to convene, to hold people together and rearrange the decks without earning enemies. He brought firm new direction to his diocese in Peru, yet without rejecting what he had inherited. He won over the Opus Dei priests, engaged movements, and reached out to conservatives and charismatics. From the start, he brought people together in synodal assemblies to agree on pastoral priorities and created an institute to form lay leaders. “After ten years of his work, lay people are really well-trained and are positioned,” his successor in Chiclayo, Bishop Edinson Farfán Córdova (also an Augustinian), told me. The content of the summer courses designed to train hundreds of laypeople was drawn, says Bishop Farfán, from the social magisterium of Francis: not just Evangelii gaudium, but also Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti.
In 2018, Prevost was elected vice president of the Peruvian bishops’ conference. The Church was at that time still dealing with the fallout from revelations of abuse and corruption at the heart of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), a right-wing Peruvian movement founded in the 1970s to combat liberation theology. The SCV enjoyed strong support from wealthy Peruvians and from the Vatican under Pope John Paul II, and over the years, many bishops would become entangled with the movement, especially José Antonio Eguren, the archbishop of Piura—the diocese neighboring Chiclayo.
The bond between Bergoglio and Prevost goes back to the first decade of the new millennium.
The publication of Mitad monjes, mitad soldados (“Half Monks, Half Soldiers”), a devastating 2015 exposé by former “sodálite” Pedro Salinas and journalist Paola Ugaz, led the SCV’s powerful allies to wage legal warfare on the authors in Peru’s corrupt, sclerotic courts. The other effect of the book was to unleash a wave of previously untold abuse stories, stories of people effectively kept as prisoners for years and humiliated by the power games of the SCV’s inner circle. As new victims continued to step forward, Paola Ugaz, overwhelmed, reached out to the Church for help. The bishops’ conference was unable to act collectively: Archbishop Eguren was involved in suing Salinas and Ugaz, while the conference’s president, Héctor Cabrejos, was reluctant to make trouble.
Prevost, together with the Jesuit cardinal Pedro Barreto and the apostolic nuncio Nicola Girasoli, acted on their own account, publicly declaring their support for the writers and finding ways over the next two years to help the victims. “Robert became the one who individually reached out to the really broken victims,” recalls Ugaz. “He became the bridge between them and the Sodalicio,” she told me in Rome after the conclave, describing how he would meet with Sodalicio leaders to secure financial and medical assistance for the victims. Ugaz describes Prevost as levelheaded, patient, and tenacious. “Robert’s not the guy who will grab a match and set light to the building. He’ll look for ways to help, to make things happen,” she says. They are friends to this day. In Rome for Pope Francis’s funeral, Ugaz brought chocolates and an Alpaca stole for her friend. She ended up giving them to him once he was pope.
In 2020, the Sodalicio stepped up their campaign against the journalists, using death threats and false claims that they were involved in money laundering. Girasoli and Bishop Prevost believed the only way to protect Ugaz was to arrange a meeting with Francis. But because of Covid, this did not happen until 2022, when Ugaz and Salinas persuaded Francis to send his crack Vatican investigators Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu. Their report not only confirmed the journalists’ claims but uncovered much more, including a money-laundering scandal that involved diocesan cemeteries.
After Prevost moved to Rome to head the Dicastery for Bishops, he was closely involved in the measures that led to the SCV’s suppression. In 2024 Francis expelled the Sodalicio founder, Luis Figari, and forced out Archbishop Eguren. He then expelled Eguren and nine other founders. Not long after Eguren fell, Prevost began to be accused of abuse coverup in media close to the SCV. The reports alleged that he had failed to deal properly with a case in Chiclayo. The diocese denied the claims, pointing out that Prevost had followed guidelines precisely. Meanwhile, Ugaz and Salinas began receiving death threats. They came to the Vatican last October, where Prevost saw them more than once. He arranged for them to meet Francis, who promised he would act decisively against the Sodalicio, telling Ugaz: “Pecadores sí, corruptos no” (“One thing are sinners; another thing are the corrupt”). In January this year, in one of his final acts, Francis signed a decree closing down the SCV, which took effect in April, shortly before he died.
At the conclave, the right-wing Spanish group InfoVaticana recirculated the claims against Prevost—claims rejected by the diocese of Chiclayo and by the Doctrine of the Dicastey of Faith in Rome—to try to prevent his election. A day before the conclave, InfoVaticana described him as a “defeated candidate…frustrated because his aspirations to the papacy had crumbled.” The quote has not worn well.
In his meeting with the press on May 12, Pope Leo’s speech defended freedom of expression and raised his voice on behalf of journalists imprisoned for speaking the truth. Later, as he greeted representatives of the press, he received Ugaz’s stole and posed for a photo with her. “If it wasn’t for Francis and Leo, we would be in jail,” she said. “That’s no joke.”
Because Leo knew Francis so well and worked with him so closely, he has had time not just to learn from him, but to consider what needs to change. On May 10, after addressing the cardinals, he asked them to spend time in silence, then meet in small groups before reconvening with him for an open-floor discussion about priorities. Leo will be more collegial in his governance than Francis. He will seek buy-in from the Curia to press through Francis’s structural reforms, which, toward the end of his pontificate, often fell short of being implemented.
Leo has already used the freedoms Francis won to make his own decisions about how to dress and where to live. He is much younger than Benedict and Francis were when they were elected; he uses X and WhatsApp; he speaks fluent American English. But he has made clear that he will continue to build the synodal Church of which Francis dreamed, while likely reformulating some of the themes of Francis’s pontificate in more Augustinian terms. He will teach us how to build a celestial city alongside the earthly city governed by the libido dominandi of the technocratic paradigm, AI, nationalism, and war. Knowing that the world will not listen to a divided Church, he asked at his inauguration Mass that we pray for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. As he told the journalists, quoting St. Augustine: “We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.”
