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On Thursday, Pope Leo XIV became a new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.
At the Reverend William Lego on the south side of Chicago, who watched television in his office when the new pope was announced, he was his old friend Bob.
“They chose a good man,” said Father Lego, the pastor of St. Turibius Parish, who has known the new pope since high school days. “He had a good feeling of right and wrong and always worked with the poor.”
The new Pope, who was born, Robert Francis Prevost, comes from the Chicago area, where he grew up in a southern outskirts just outside the city.
His family belonged to the now shocked St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in the Riverdale neighborhood on the south side of Chicago and then populates by crowd of Catholic families. His father, Louis Prevost, was a school inspector in Chicago Heights, a suburb in Cook County. His mother, Mildred Prevost, was a librarian and was deeply involved in parish life, according to her death report in 1990 as president of St. Mary Altar Rosary Society.
Noelle Neis remembers that he was behind the Prevost family every Sunday at 9.15 am as a child in St. Mary’s.
“You would always go to the same mass and spend in the same bank,” said Mrs. Neis, 69, who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. “They were always there.”
By the time the newly chosen Pope reached adolescence, he looked at the priesthood and registered in St. Augustine Seminary High School in Holland, Mich., A Kostschool for Boys.
There he lived in the Augustine tradition, with his intense focus on community: eating together, studying together, sharing everything about their lives.
The new pope then studied at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, and achieved a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1977, before he returned to Chicago to go to the Catholic Theological Union, a Graduate School and achieve a divinity.
The Archdiocese of Chicago serves around two million Catholics in the Cook and Lake provinces, about a third of the population of the provinces.
In Chicago, when the word began to spread that the new pope was one of their own, Catholics said they were excited – and a touch overwhelmed.
“He is not only an American, but he comes from Chicago,” said Veronica Cervantes, a 52-year-old executive recruiter. “That’s shocking.”
Mitch Smith And Robert Chiarito contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
