The New Pope

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Habemus Papam! The world’s 1.4 billion Catholics have a new leader — Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the first American-born pope.

The 69-year-old is originally from Chicago and has chosen the papal name Leo XIV. He was most recently the head of the dicastery responsible for the appointment of bishops and the archbishop emeritus of Chiclayo, Peru.

“Peace be with all you,” Pope Leo XIV said from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in his first public words. He was met with joyful cheering from a crowd that numbered around 150,000, according to Italian officials.

The decision to elect an American goes against conventional wisdom, which has held that the United States holds enough power in the world already. The new pope has spent much of his life outside the U.S. so is also considered to have a global perspective, and in fact holds a Peruvian passport in addition to his American and Vatican ones.

Leo referred to his predecessor during his address, recalling Francis' last Easter address the day before he died.

"We still hold in our ears that weak yet ever courageous voice of Pope Francis as he blessed Rome—the Pope who blessed Rome, who gave his blessing to the world, to the whole world," he said.

"Help us as well — help one another — to build bridges through dialogue, through encounter, uniting everyone to be one single people always in peace."

Leo is well known as a leader of the Augustinian order and for his work as a diocesan bishop in Peru. During his address to the cheering crowds in St. Peter’s Square, he briefly thanked the city of Chiclayo, in Northern Peru where he was bishop, in Spanish.

In addition to English and Spanish, Leo speaks Italian, French and Portuguese, and reads Latin and German.

President Donald Trump quickly congratulated the pope.

“It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

While he is being greeted with warm congratulations, Leo will inevitably face scrutiny for his handling of sexual abuse cases in Peru and as an Augustinian superior.

In his hometown, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson added some City of Big Shoulders swagger when he posted his congratulations on X. The new pope is from the city's South Side.

"Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago! Congratulations to the first American Pope Leo XIV! We hope to welcome you back home soon," Johnson wrote.

Before Leo made his first appearance as pope, Dominique Mamberti, the senior cardinal deacon, declared from St. Peter’s balcony overlooking the square, “Habemus Papam” — Latin for “We have a pope.”

The crowds in St. Peter’s Square had erupted and bells pealed from the towering basilica when white smoke began billowing from a chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, announcing the election of a new pope.

Thanks for posting.

My dad thinks this is a joke so I'll ask on his behalf. Isn't the papacy only for European Catholics only?

Leo XIV?

What's wrong with Bob the First?

Or since he's the head of the Catholic Church.... Bob the Head

Bob the Pious?... Or after a sacremental over indulgence ... Bob the Pie-eyed?

So much amusement potential.

While he is being greeted with warm congratulations, Leo will inevitably face scrutiny for his handling of sexual abuse cases in Peru and as an Augustinian superior.

Pope Leo XIV's religious order still mired in secrecy over child sex abuse

The new pope, Chicago area native Robert Prevost, has faced criticism for not doing more to encourage his religious order, the Augustinians, to embrace transparency over the decades-long sex abuse crisis.

Cardinal Robert Prevost, the new pope and the first U.S. leader of the Catholic Church worldwide, is already being hailed as a breath of fresh air by some.

But the ancient religious order that he’s part of and once led in Chicago and internationally — the Augustinians — is still considered one of the more backward Catholic organizations in terms of transparency and reform when it comes to the decades-old child sex abuse crisis that’s involved children being molested by clergy, and leaders often covering it up.

The Midwest Augustinians — based on the Far Southwest Side, and led by Prevost more than two decades ago — only last year created a publicly available list of its credibly accused offenders.

That came six years after the religious order the late Pope Francis had been part of, the Jesuits, released a comprehensive list of its offenders in the Chicago region and beyond — a log now considered the gold standard in church transparency.

Some other Catholic organizations’ lists — including one from the Archdiocese of Baltimore — date back to 2002, when the biggest wave of the scandal broke after a series of Boston Globe articles about abuse and cover-ups.

Victims have repeatedly advocated for public lists as a form of accountability and a means toward healing.

The Augustinians’ list from 2024 only came under pressure, after a drumbeat of negative news coverage over sex abuse and child pornography allegations against the Rev. Richard McGrath, who was the longtime leader of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox.

The group’s list excludes McGrath’s name; leaders say the accusations weren’t substantiated according to their standards.

The Rev. Tony Pizzo, one of Prevost’s successors at the helm of the Midwest province, has recently refused to answer whether McGrath remains a priest.

So have Prevost’s successors overseeing the Rome-based order around the globe: the Rev. Alejandro Moral Antón, the prior general and a Spaniard; and the group’s vicar general, the Rev. Joseph Farrell, an American.

The main knock against Prevost has been perceived inaction on improving transparency in his order over sex abuse.

But he has faced more direct criticism based on the findings of a 2021 Chicago Sun-Times story that the Augustinians had, while he was in charge of the Augustinians in Chicago in 2000, allowed an accused pedophile priest to live at a South Side monastery without telling a nearby Catholic elementary school the man was there.

Indeed, church records assert there was no school nearby when there was.

That information came to light after the Sun-Times discovered McGrath had also been moved to the monastery in 2017 or 2018 after some of the accusations against him emerged — and by that time a preschool was across the alley, and also hadn’t been notified by the order.

In 2021, as the Augustinians were refusing to come clean about aspects of the abuse crisis, a long-ago friend of Prevost’s from the Chicago area suggested to a Sun-Times reporter that he reach out to Prevost for help in obtaining information, saying, “Bob is a good guy, and I am surprised if he would stonewall.”

The Sun-Times emailed Prevost, who responded: “I’m glad you’re enjoying good weather in Chicago!

“I will be traveling internationally over the coming week. It may not be easy to make phone contact. Feel free to send questions you might have, and if I can I will be glad to answer. I have been away from the Chicago area for some time, and am not sure how much information about the Midwest Province of the Augustinians I would be able to offer you — outside of what you have already been able to find. But, again, feel free to send your questions and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Take care.”

Among the follow-up questions asked via email was whether he had “any idea if/when the Chicago province is going to put out a public list of the credibly accused, and if so, when — and if not, why not? Any idea why it’s taken so long after even our cardinal called for greater transparency in 2018?”

Prevost never responded again.

After Prevost left the Chicago province in 2001 to take over the order internationally, Ken Kaczmarz, who had accused an Augustinian named John Murphy of molesting him as a boy years earlier at a South Side parish, contacted a Prevost colleague in the province to alert him that Murphy, then gone from the order, was serving as a docent at the Shedd Aquarium.

“He refused to do anything about it,” Kaczmarz said, referring to a now-deceased Augustinian leader, the Rev. G. Jerome Knies.

Given Prevost’s oversight of the group for years, Kaczmarz said of his elevation to pope: “I’m shaking I’m so upset. It’s clearly obvious that they didn’t [care] about that guy’s history.”

A Chicago area priest who asked not to be named said of Prevost: “What really bothers me about this new pope is that no matter what his theological background, just like other priests and bishops, he housed predators near a school.”

In 2023, as the Sun-Times asked about whether Prevost failed in dealing adequately with child sex abuse, Pizzo came to his defense in an email forwarded by a spokeswoman. It said:

“Nothing is more important to the Augustinians and me than transparency. Years before it became the general law of the Church, under the leadership of Fr. Prevost” — the new pope’s title at the time — “put into place the requirement that there be a set of protocols in every Circumscription of the Order, to guide all members in the different aspects of promoting child protection as well as in responding to cases where accusations might be received.

“Under the direction of Fr. Prevost, a course was organized, during the Intermediate General Chapter of 2010, for all Major Superiors of the Order, regarding the protection of minors and the proper ways of responding to victims when cases were presented.”

Prevost’s name surfaced in passing in a lawsuit that accused McGrath of molesting a former Providence student named Robert Krankvich. The priest that succeeded McGrath at Providence, the Rev. John Merkelis, gave a deposition in that case and relayed that Prevost had “invited” him to take a recruiting position in the order. Prevost was not accused of doing anything wrong in that case.

The attorney who represented Krankvich and has ongoing claims against the Augustinians, Marc Pearlman, said of Prevost’s selection as pope: “I hope this is an indication that the Augustinians in Chicago will do a better job at dealing with survivors of sexual abuse. I would say that they owe it to the pope to do so, and the survivors.”

My dad thinks this is a joke so I'll ask on his behalf. Isn't the papacy only for European Catholics only?

For centuries, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were largely Italians until a cardinal from Poland was elected pope in 1978 and then succeeded by a German and an Argentine.

Now, for the first time, the pope's an American who has taken the name Leo XIV.

And he's from the South Side of Chicago, home of the beleaguered White Sox, the Daley political dynasty and, until they decamped for Washington and eventually the White House, Michelle and Barack Obama.

The new pope, who has spent much of his career ministering in Peru and leading the Vatican’s powerful office of bishops, was born Robert Francis Prevost on Sept. 14, 1955, at what was then called Mercy Hospital, at the corner of South Prairie Avenue and 34th Street.

But while Prevost made his debut in Chicago, his parents and two older brothers were already living just south of the sprawling city in a working-class suburb called Dolton.

Home was a tidy brick house the Prevosts bought new in 1949 on East 141st Place.

Prevost's father, Louis Prevost, served in the Navy during World War II and worked as a superintendent of schools in the south suburbs of Chicago.

The future pope's mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was a librarian with a master's degree in education and two sisters who were nuns.

But the focus of the family was St. Mary of the Assumption Parish on 137th Street, which was then a busy church and school that straddled the Chicago/Dolton border.

t was there that the Prevost family regularly attended Mass, which back then was still in Latin. And it was there that his classmates realized that Robert was already practicing what he would one day be preaching.

“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.”

While most of the boys from St. Mary's went on to local Catholic high schools like Mendel College Prep, Prevost left home and attended St. Augustine Seminary High School, a boarding school in Holland, Michigan, that was run by priests from the Order of St. Augustine.

Upon graduating, he headed east to Villanova University in Pennsylvania, a private Catholic college, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in math in 1977. By then, he had found his calling, and in 1978 he officially joined the Order of St. Augustine.

Four years later, in June 1982, Prevost was ordained a priest after having studied theology at Catholic Theological Union of Chicago. Then he was off to Rome, where he earned a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1987.

He returned to Chicago, but only briefly, before he was dispatched in 1985 to Peru, where he served the order as a missionary and taught canon law in the diocesan seminary in the city of Trujillo for 10 years.

By 1999, Prevost was back in Chicago and appointed leader of the Augustinian order's Midwestern region, which he oversaw until 2010.

Part of his turf included Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, and it was during his tenure that allegations surfaced that the school’s president, the Rev. Richard McGrath, had abused at least one student and kept child pornography images on his phone.

The Sun-Times reported last June that the Augustinians paid a $2  million settlement to the abused student and that Prevost never explained why he did not remove McGrath from his post.

By 2014, Prevost was back in Peru after Pope Francis appointed him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo and later the bishop of Chiclayo.

But in Peru, he was once again accused of failing to investigate and punish a priest accused of sexually abusing three sisters from 2007 to 2015.

The Diocese of Chiclayo denied a cover-up, and Prevost has never been personally accused of abusing members of his flock.

The allegations also did not derail his rise through the ranks.

Francis promoted him to archbishop in January 2023 and made him a cardinal a year later.

In public statements, Prevost often echoed Francis with calls for “reaching out to the poor, to the neediest, to those on the margins.”

But while Francis promoted greater acceptance of LGBTQ people, Prevost in a 2012 took a less tolerant tone in an address to a group of bishops, complaining that Western culture was fostering "sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel," The New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, Prevost's other job running the office that helps decide who will be appointed a bishop made him a contender for the top job at the Vatican, which he landed Thursday.

Speaking in Spanish and Italian, but not in English, Pope Leo stood on the balcony overlooking his cheering flock and thanked the pope who blazed the path for him. He also laid out a vision of the future that Francis would most likely have applauded.

“We can be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges, that is always open to receive everyone — just like in this square, to welcome everyone, in charity, dialogue and love,” he said

Pope Leo XIV appealed to the world's major powers for "no more war" in his first Sunday message to crowds in St. Peter's Square since his election as pontiff.

The new pope, elected on May 8, called for an "authentic and lasting peace" in Ukraine, a ceasefire in Gaza, and the release of all Israeli hostages held by militant group Hamas.

"No more war!" the pope said, repeating a frequent call of the late Pope Francis and noting the recent 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, in which some 60 million people were killed.

Leo said today's world was living through "the dramatic scenario of a Third World War being fought piecemeal," again repeating a phrase coined by Francis.

Tens of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square and on the Via della Conciliazione leading to the Vatican broke into applause at the call for peace on what was a joyous occasion despite Leo's solemn message.

The new pope said he carries in his heart the "suffering of the beloved people of Ukraine."
Hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed direct talks with Ukraine aimed at ending the bloody three-year war, Leo appealed for negotiations to reach an "authentic, just and lasting peace".

The pope also said he was "profoundly saddened" by the war in Gaza, calling for an immediate ceasefire, humanitarian aid and release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas.

Leo said he was glad to hear of the recent India-Pakistan ceasefire and hoped negotiations would lead to a lasting accord between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
He added: "But there are so many other conflicts in the world!"