Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a native of Chicago who is now the first American-born pope, has spent most of his career outside of the United States, ministering to the dispossessed and marginalized.
The “Latin Yankee,” as he is known in Rome, worked 20 years in Peru’s poorest enclave — falling so in love with the country that he became a naturalized citizen. His commitment there echoes the legacy of Pope Francis, an Argentine who became the Catholic Church’s first leader from South America.
“He’s right out of Francis’s playbook,” said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on U.S. Catholics. “He ticks off all the boxes of a future pope: a pastoral heart, managerial experience and vision.”
Francis turned to Prevost on repeated occasions. In 2022, he had him preside over a revolutionary reform: adding three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations go forward to the pope. Yet his successor is considered more middle of the road, pragmatic as well as cautious.
In picking the 69-year-old Prevost, the papal conclave in Rome looked past allegations that hehad mishandled or failed to act on sexual abuse cases involving priests in both Peru and the United States.
He was selected despite being “an enigma to cardinals, especially to American cardinals, because he spent his life outside of the United States,” said Jon Morris, a theologian and former priest who has been in Rome to observe the transition as a Fox News contributor.
Prevost’s childhood roots were deep on Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up worshiping at St. Mary of the Assumption Church on E. 137th Street. Local media have reported that his father, of French and Italian ancestry, was an educator who served in the church as a catechist and that his mother, of Spanish ancestry, was a librarian. Members of the clergy would come to his family’s home from across Illinois for community and his mother’s tasty cooking, according to the Pillar, a Catholic media project.
As a youth, he served as an altar boy and went to the parish school and then a seminary high school. He attended Villanova University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1977. He was ordained five years later and completed a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Then came two decades of service in Peru, much of it as a missionary and parish priest.
Prevost, who is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French, was twice elected top leader of the centuries-old Order of St. Augustine. Its website describes the international order as “living together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God,” calling nothing your own and living communally.
Francis tracked Prevost’s career for years, sending him back to Peru in 2014 after appointing him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo, in the country’s northwest. In 2015, he was named bishop there.
In 2023, the pope appointed Prevost to dual roles: president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and leader of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful office at the Vatican that selects bishops around the world. He held that latter position until Francis died on April 21.
His role in two different cases of sexual abuse by priests in Chicago and Peru ultimately did not derail him.
The first case dates to about 25 years ago, when Prevost led the Augustinian Province of Chicago. A priest who church leaders found had sexually abused minors was allowed to stay at an Augustinian monastery near a Catholic elementary school. The Vatican denied Prevost ever authorized that arrangement.
More recently, questions were raised about Prevost’s knowledge of abuse allegations in the Chiclayo diocese during his tenure as bishop. Two priests were accused of molesting three young girls, and a complaint this year by Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) alleged that “Prevost failed to open an investigation [and]sent inadequate information to Rome.”
The Vatican again denied any wrongdoing by Prevost.
“Given what we know about the pervasiveness of clerical sexual abuse, it is certainly plausible that abuse occurred on his watch; he was superior general of a congregation of priests that ministers in 50 countries across the globe,” Cummings said. “It’s also entirely conceivable that he failed to act decisively in punishing perpetrators and supporting victims but, sadly, that’s true of almost all the men who occupied positions of high leadership in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. The cardinal electors would be hard-pressed to find a man among their number whose record on this issue is spotless.”
Because he has crisscrossed multiple borders — both geographic and religious — Prevost had a prominence going into the conclave that few other cardinals had, Cummings said.
In a 2023 interview with Vatican News, Prevost spoke about the essential leadership quality of a bishop.
“Pope Francis has spoken of four types of closeness: closeness to God, to brother bishops, to priests and to all God’s people,” he said. “One must not give in to the temptation to live isolated, separated in a palace, satisfied with a certain social level or a certain level within the church.
“And we must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today,” he continued. “The authority we have is to serve, to accompany priests, to be pastors and teachers.”
