The pope of peace, continuity, reconciliation

“Peace be with you all,” Pope Leo XIV greeted, from the Central Loggia or balcony of Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica, the 100,000 faithful at St. Peter’s Square, to introduce himself as the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

In his first speech as the 267th pontiff and as the bishop of Rome, the former Cardinal Robert “Bob” Francis Prevost, 69, greeted the city of Rome and the world’s Catholics.

Speaking in Italian and Spanish for 10 minutes, the American-born pledged to work for uniting Catholic faithful to Jesus and to the Gospel. Pope Leo said:

“God loves us, all of us, evil will not prevail. We are all in the hands of God. Without fear, united, hand in hand with God and among ourselves, we will go forward. We are disciples of Christ, Christ goes before us, and the world needs His light. Humanity needs Him like a bridge to reach God and His love. You help us to build bridges with dialogue and encounter so we can all be one people always in peace.”

With those words, Leo XIV begins what could be a long reign during a time of unprecedented turmoil and tension amid rising protectionism, trade shocks, growing militarism and authoritarianism, unbridled conflict and violence (from Armenia to Gaza to Ukraine to Yemen), irreversible global warming and evolving technology that creates machines that are more intelligent than humans.There are today at least 56 ongoing conflicts involving 92 countries, including the world’s two greatest powers – the US and China.

Prevost is hugely qualified for the papal job, one of the most backbreaking, physically demanding and death-defying despite its enormous soft power and influence.

He earned a degree in mathematics from Villanova University in Pennsylvania in 1977, a Master’s of Divinity from the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago in 1982, the same year he was ordained at age 27. He finished a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome in 1987. A polyglot, he speaks five languages – English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, and reads German and Latin.

Prevost was elected pope during the fourth balloting on May 8, 2025 of the 133 electors of the College of Cardinals to succeed Pope Francis who died on April 21, 2025 at the age of 88.

Prevost is the first Augustinian, the first American and the second pope from the Americas, after the Argentinian Pope Francis. He was made cardinal by Pope Francis only last 2023 and was in charge of the Vatican department that names bishops.

Leo XIV is the perfect pope in an age of crippling divisiveness and troubling technology.

He inherits Francis’ missionary zeal and outreach to the Catholics who are at the peripheries of the world – the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, making him welcoming to progressives of the Church hierarchy. At the same time, he is strict on doctrine – the marriage of only a man and a woman, homosexuality is an aberration and a sin, no women as deacons and no to abortion. Such views make Leo a centrist.

Says The New York Times: “Pope Leo XIV is expected to be a unifying figure after years of fractious ideological tensions between the progressive and conservative wings of the Catholic Church.”

His old media posts slam US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” Prevost posted when the VP, a recent Catholic, claimed Church doctrine supports Trump’s immigration policies.

“What a great honor for our country!” Trump gushed of the first American pope.

Pope Leo is seen as reserved, cautious, calm. He is warm and accessible but not to the extent of kissing babies and washing the feet of inmates. “He is not a showboat,” recalls a long-time friend.

CNN quotes Rev. John Lydon who was together with the new pope as an undergrad at Villanova and were also together in Peru: “He’s not an American pope, he’s a pope who happened to be born in the US.”

Prevost’s choice of Leo as his name is indicative of what he intends to do as pope.

Past Pope Leos were said to be reformers. Pope Leo XIII was elected in 1878 and wrote the encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” the Church’s catechism on the rights and the dignity of capital and labor, and on the need to ameliorate “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”

In a TV interview in 2023, Cardinal Prevost described his work for Pope Francis:

“I’ve been a missionary my whole life, working in Peru. But I am American, and I think I do have some insights into the Church of the United States – the need to be able to advise and work with Pope Francis and to look at the challenges that the Church of the United States is facing… with a healthy dialogue.”

Prevost spent many years as a missionary in Peru before being elected head of the Augustinians for two consecutive terms.

Robert Francis Prevost was born in a hospital on Sept. 14, 1955, in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of three brothers to Louis Marius Prevost, of French and Italian descent, and Mildred Martínez, of Spanish descent. He has two brothers, Louis Martín and John Joseph.

His father served in the Navy during World War II and was a superintendent of schools in a Chicago suburb. His mother was a librarian with a master’s degree in education and had two sisters who were nuns. The Prevosts lived in a tidy brick house bought in 1949.

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