Léon XIV, a Pope of the Americas

Robert Francis Prevost is certainly Yankee by birth but added the nationality of the Andean country. If he came to the world in Chicago, a large part of his heart remains in Latin America, in this poor and politically troubled Peru where he lived more than twenty years as a missionary and bishop.

Double symbolic significance: first pontiff of a US Church of 53 million baptized, it is clearly belonging to its open wing, in contrast to Vice-President JD Vance. He is the second Latino pope after François, making by his personality and his career the bridge between the two Americas, the richest and the poorest.

Its origins have already been able to open it up to diversity, to immigration: mixed, they are those of these many families of the American melting pot. Of Italian-French origin by his father, Spanish by his mother. Through it, the Creole origins of Louisiana, and, it is said, distant Haitian. In American society a century ago, “laundering” by weddings was for a family the guarantee of better integrating …

When the young Father Prevost will integrate the “beggar order” of the Augustinians represented in fifty countries and in particular to Latin America, he will be sent in 1982 on a mission to Peru. The “mission” is therefore at the heart of its priesthood. He will become prior general of this order and will travel to Africa.

It is under this cap that he will meet Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2006 when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. A photo watches them. During his visit to Peru in 2018, François will see himself again. The current will pass so well that he will name him, five years later, prefect of the powerful dicastery of bishops to the Vatican, a charge requiring firmness and fingering which will make him known and appreciate until the conclave.

A pastor listening, smiling, comfortable

What was his experience in Peru who made him so much appreciated by the Argentinian pope, to the point that they were friendly and often saw each other? In the various dioceses, he will have seen the difficult life of the Campesinos and the inhabitants of the miserable barrios.

According to those who rubbed shoulders with him, he will refer a lot to the social doctrine of the Church initiated by Léon XIII, will frequent and appreciate the theologian of the Liberation Gustavo Guttierez, but will be suspicious as soon as the too ideological postures prevent any dialogue. And he will share popular piety, pillar of “Bergoglisme”. He will have left the memory of a pastor listening, smiling, comfortable, speaking quietly to people with respect but without familiarity. He will have had sensitive files to decide in a very divided Church between a fringe Opus dei And the rest of the episcopate, political instability adding to tensions.

“A Pan American Pope”

Respect for migrants, a hot topic in the United States with expulsions and their criminalization by the Trump administration, is one of the major challenges in South and Central America. Mgr Prevost will have seen the hundreds of Venezuelans arrive in Peru in particular, fleeing the dictatorship of Hugo Chavez and suffering from trafficking and discrimination.

But not only: he will have made other journeys under precarious conditions towards other outskirts as responsible for the Augustinians, as in 2010 in the eccentric region of Doungou in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As the professor of historical theology Massimo Faggioli says in The cross“I do not expect it to be soft” with regard to the Trumpian line, and, if he is not “a liberal Catholic”, he is “a social Catholic” and “a Pan American”.