For the first time ever, an American has been elected to lead the Catholic Church.
Robert Francis Provost is from the South Side of Chicago; home to the Chicago Bulls, Cubs, and White Sox. Oh yeah, and former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Provost’s mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was a librarian with a master’s degree in education and his two sisters who were nuns.
According to his family, Provost knew from a young age he would become a man led by Christ. His friends in school also knew it then.
“We used to pray with our hands, you know, our fingers pointing to heaven, and after a while you get tired of doing that, and you just want to fold them over,” former classmate Marianne Angarola, 69, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Robert Prevost never folded his hands over. He was just godly. Not in an in-your-face way. It was part of his aura, like he was hand-selected, and he embraced it. And he wasn’t weird. He was nice.”
Prevost left home after middle school and attended St. Augustine Seminary High School, a boarding school in Holland, Michigan, that was run by priests from the Order of St. Augustine.
After graduating, he attended Villanova University in Pennsylvania, a private Catholic college, where he got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He officially joined the Order of St. Augustine in 1978.
In 1982, Prevost was ordained a priest after he studied theology at Catholic Theological Union of Chicago.
Leo will likely face scrutiny for allegedly failing to investigate and punish a priest accused of sexually abusing three sisters in Peru from 2007 to 2015.
The Diocese of Chiclayo denied a cover-up, and Prevost has never been accused of abusing members
Pope Francis appointed him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo and later the bishop of Chiclayo. Francis promoted him to archbishop in January 2023 and made him a cardinal a year later.
