For centuries, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were largely Italian until a Cardinal of Poland was elected Pope in 1978 and then happened by a German and an Argentine.
Now, for the first time, the Pope is an American who has taken the name of Leo XIV.
And it is on the southern side of Chicago, home of the beaten white average, Daley’s political dynasty and, until they vanished by Washington and finally the White House, Michelle and Barack Obama.
Leo, who has spent much of his career ministering in Peru and leading the powerful Vatican Bishops office, Robert Francis Prevost was born on September 14, 1955, in what was then called Mercy Hospital, at the corner of South Prairie Avenue and 34th Street.
But while Premost made his debut in Chicago, his parents and two older brothers already lived just south of the extensive city in a working class suburb called Dolton.
The home was an orderly brick house, the previous ones bought in 1949 in East 141st Place.
Premost’s father, Louis Prevost, served in the Navy during World War II and worked as a superintendent of schools in the suburbs of southern Chicago.
The Pope’s future mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was a librarian with a master’s degree in education and two sisters who were nuns.
But the family’s approach was St. Mary of the parish of the Assumption on 137th Street, which was then an occupied church and school that extended to Horcajadas on the Chicago/Dolton border.
It was there that the Prevost family regularly attended the Mass, which at that time was still in Latin. And it was there that his classmates realized that Robert was already practicing what one day would 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,” said former classmate Marianne Angarola, 69, to Chicago Sun-Times. “Robert Prevost never folded his hands. He was piado.
While the majority of St. Mary’s children went to local Catholic secondary schools such as Mendel College Prep, Prevost left their home and attended St. Augustine Seminary High School, a boarding school in Holland, Michigan, who was directed by priests of the Order of St. Augustine.
When he graduated, he went to the east to the University of Villanova in Pennsylvania, a private Catholic University, where he obtained a degree in Mathematics in 1977. By then, he had found his vocation, and in 1978 he officially joined the order of St. Augustine.
Four years later, in June 1982, Prevost was ordered priest after having studied theology at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago. Then he went to Rome, where he obtained a doctorate in the Canon Law of the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1987.
He returned to Chicago, but only briefly, before being sent in 1985 to Peru, where he fulfilled the order as a missionary and taught canonical law in the Diocesan Seminary in the city of Trujillo for 10 years.
For 1999, Prevost returned to Chicago and appointed leader of the Region of the West of the Augustinian Order, which supervised until 2010.
Part of his grass included the Catholic High School of Providence in New Lenox, and it was during his mandate that accusations arose that the president of the school, the Reverend Richard McGrath, had abused at least one student and maintained images of child pornography on his phone.
The Sun-Times reported last June that the Augustinians paid a $ 2 million agreement to the abused student and that Prevost never explained why he did not eliminate McGrath from his post.
For 2014, Prevost returned 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 not investigating and punishing 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 the members of his flock.
The accusations did not derail their rise through the ranks.
Francis amounted to the archbishop in January 2023 and made him a Cardinal a year later.
In public statements, Prevost often echoed Francis with calls to “reach the poor, the most needy, to those of the margins.”
But while Francis promoted greater acceptance of LGBTQ people, Prevost in 2012 took a less tolerant tone in a speech to a group of bishops, whom he complained that Western culture was promoting “sympathy for beliefs and practices that disagree with the Gospel,” said the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the other Premost work, as the person who runs the office that helps decide who will be appointed bishop, made him a contender for the main work in the Vatican, which landed on Thursday.
Speaking in Spanish and Italian, but not in English, Pope Leo stopped on the balcony overlooking his flock flock and thanked the Pope who opened the way. He also presented a vision of the future that Francis would probably have applauded.
“We can be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges, which is always open to receive everyone, as in this square, to welcome everyone, in charity, dialogue and love,” he said.
