Affable, moderate, reserved, the American cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, since this Thursday Pope Leo XIV, was one of Francisco’s great bets, who appointed him responsible for bishops around the world and his commission for Latin America.
This missionary of the former Order of San Agustín, who also has Peruvian nationality, has been in recent years a narrow collaborator of the late Pope Francis and entered his style, discreetly, in the list of ‘papables’ for this conclave, as an ‘outsider’ in the midst of other great names.
His moderate mood positions him as a bridge between the conservative and reforming factions of the Church and his vast knowledge of America has earned him the support of the South and North Cardinals of the continent, many of the last critics with Francisco.
Prevost was born in 1955 in Chicago (EU). His ecclesiastical career began with the Augustinian novitiate of Saint Louis where, in 1981, he assumed his votes. Then the theology studies and a youth trip to Rome would arrive to study canon law.
After ordering priest in 1982, with 28 years, he was immediately sent to the one who would become his second country: Peru, through his mission of Chulucanas, in Piura (1985-1986).
This would be the first step of a long way in Latin America that continued in 1988 in the Peruvian mission of Trujillo, selecting Augustinian vocations in cities such as Chulucanas, Iquitos and Apurímac and exercising other roles for a decade in that archdiocese.
Prevost also accumulates a long teaching experience in his country, also as a prior general of the Augustinian chapter of Chicago, until in 2014, from Rome, Pope Francis put him in charge of the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo, as an apostolic administrator.
A year later he would be appointed by Francisco Obispo de Chiclayo and since 2018 he was second vice president of the Episcopal Conference of Peru, facing among other things the serious crisis for the abuses of the Sodalicio Group of Christian life, dissolved this year by the Pope.
After a Peruvian five years, in 2023 the Argentine pontiff called Rome to make him a cardinal and appoint him prefect of the dicastery for the bishops, the Vatican ministry that chooses the monsignors of the entire planet.
At the head of this powerful institution, which controls a huge network of prelates worldwide, also attended the struggles of his mentor, Pope Francis, with Catholic conservatives, embodied for example with the dismissal of the American bishop Joseph Strickland in November 2011, unfair with the Holy See.
But Francisco also put him as president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America thanks to his great knowledge about the reality and peripheries of the subcontinent.
His role as “wave” of bishops and his South American experience makes Prevost a continuous contact with the ecclesiastical hierarchy around the world, especially in America, the region with half of the planet’s Catholics (about 637 million in 2004).
But his pontifical choice is a novelty not only because he is considered a young cardinal, with 69 years, but also because he becomes the first pope arrives from the heart of an already powerful enough empire, the United States.
At the teaching level, although cautious, he has spoken in line with Pope Francis, defending the idea of a clergy “close to the people”, diametrically opposed to the figure of a “manager” or “a manager.
And about the scourge of the abuses that the Church has shaken in recent years, and that the Argentine pontiff faced, has claimed the obligation to “be transparent and accompany the victims.”
With EFE information
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