Pope Leo XIV was formed by his family and early life in the Archdiocese of Chicago, which was both a melting pot for Catholics from around the world and a leader in the U.S. church, according to speakers on two panels about the first pope born in North America at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting held in Chicago Jan. 8-11.
In a Jan. 9 session, panelists discussed what the first American pope means for the Catholic Church and for the study of American Catholicism.
They noted that while Leo is undoubtedly an American pope since he comes from the Americas, he has spent only about a third of his life in the United States. Most of his pastoral ministry took place in Peru, where he was a pastor in Chulucanas and bishop of Chiclayo, and his work as the leader of the worldwide Augustinian order and as a prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops took him to Rome.
That experience gave him the three things the cardinal electors were looking for, according to Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame and a former director of the Cushwa Center there. That is pastoral experience, a global viewpoint and savvy administration skills.
The cardinal electors were looking for someone who could continue Pope Francis’ initiatives, but with a different style, said Colleen Dulle, Vatican correspondent for America magazine.
“The cardinals were looking for a Paul VI who could follow Pope Francis’ John XXIII,” she said, speaking of the popes who opened and closed the Second Vatican Council. “Someone who could land the plane, primarily the plane of synodality. He has a different personal style: more reserved, less likely to speak off the cuff, a style of consensus building.”
That emphasis on consensus was likely strengthened during Pope Leo’s time as the Augustinian superior, said Brian Flanagan, the John Cardinal Cody chair of Catholic theology at Loyola University Chicago. The principal of synodality has been important in women’s and men’s religious communities, in which the global congregation is a “community of communities” and governance relies on consensus.
“The kind of pope I think Leo is going to be is one who does a lot less ordering and a lot more cajoling, bribing, smoothing over,” Flanagan said. “The papacy is not so much at the top of a pyramid but the center of the conversation.”
Miguel Diaz, the John Courtney Murray, SJ, university chair in public service at Loyola, echoed the importance of Pope Leo’s Augustinian roots.
“We are shaped by the relationships we have,” Diaz said. “We have to consider Chicago and Chiclayo. … Expect Augustine. Just like Ignatius of Loyola came up all the time with Francis, there’s a lot in the Augustinian tradition that will creep in.”
In a Jan. 11 panel on “Pope Leo’s Chicago: From Local Boy to Global Citizen,” Deborah Kanter noted that as Pope Leo was growing up and in formation as an Augustinian, there was an emphasis on mission work in Latin America among priests from Chicago.
That was during the period when the Archdiocese of Chicago established the San Miguelito mission in Panama, the Claretians were working in Guatemala and the Midwest Augustinians — the province that Pope Leo called home — established a long-term presence in Peru.
“Latin America was in the air when Prevost began his formation with the Augustinians and in Catholic Chicago,” said Kanter, a professor emeritus of history at Albion College in Michigan and author of “Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican” and “Pioneers of Latino Ministry: Claretians and the Evolving World of Catholic America.”
Chicago historian Ellen Skerrett traced Leo’s involvement with the Augustinians to his mother, born Mildred Martinez, who was baptized and married at Holy Name Cathedral and attended one year at Mundelein College before graduating from DePaul University.
Mildred Prevost was the librarian at Mendel Catholic High School, started by the Augustinians in 1951, only a few miles away from the family’s modest home in Dolton, once her three sons were all in school. She led the parents’ club at Mendel when her older two boys attended.
The youngest, Robert, went to the Augustinians high school seminary in Michigan, probably because he was already talking about a priestly vocation and he had excellent academic potential, Skerrett said.
Sprows Cummings said that she sees Chicago as a “hinge” between the church in the United States and the universal church, at least since the 1920s.
In 1926, hundreds of thousands of American Catholics participated in the 28th Eucharistic Congress, with events at Soldier Field and the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein. Cardinal Giovanni Bonzano, the apostolic delegate, traveled to Chicago by special Pullman train, and was received by Cardinal George Mundelein at a specially constructed station near Holy Name Cathedral.
During the congress, the two cardinals spoke about the potential for canonization of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, despite her having died in Chicago less than a decade earlier, at a time when the procedure was to wait 50 years before opening a cause for sainthood, said Sprows Cummings, who is also the former chair of the board of the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Chicago.
The cause was opened, and Mother Cabrini, a naturalized U.S. citizen, became the first American saint in 1946.
Less than a decade after that, Robert Prevost, who would become Pope Leo, was born at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital during the Cold War, at a time when some American Catholics were openly talking about an American pope as a possibility to help contain the spread of communism.
“The first American pope is very different from what 1950s boosters expected,” Sprows Cummings said. “In the minds of the 133 cardinal electors, Prevost’s U.S. citizenship was largely beside the point. South American cardinals considered him one of their own, and rightly so. … Like Cabrini, their U.S. citizenship means more to other U.S. citizens than it does to them.”
Rather than being seen as bolstering the American government, Pope Leo is seen as a counterpoint to it.
“Before May 8, 2025, the best-known American in the world was named Donald Trump,” Sprows Cummings said. “After May 8, 2025, the best-known American in the world was Pope Leo.”
“He’s a different symbol, from ‘America first’ to ‘America cares,’” said Diaz, who was the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See from 2009 to 2012.
How that will play out remains to be seen. Dulle said that it is only now that the Holy Door has been closed and the Jubilee of Hope ended on Jan. 6 that Pope Leo will be able to focus on his own priorities.
“During the jubilee, he was constrained by already scheduled events,” she said. “The question was, come Jan. 7, what’s he going to do?”
What he did at his general audience that day “was announce a series of catechetical talks on the documents of Vatican II.”
“There’s this idea that it takes 100 years to implement a council,” Dulle said. “He warned against some of the interpretations. What’s his interpretation going to be? What he decides has massive impact on the church and a massive impact on how Vatican II is remembered centuries from now.”