The New Pope Is a Child of the American Suburban Church

(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

The last Leo, the 13th of that name, was pope for 25 years, the fourth longest papacy in history, if you count St. Peter himself. He died in 1903 having spent his papacy wrestling the church into the brand-new century. He worked to reconcile science and religion. He opened the Vatican archives to researchers and reopened the Vatican observatory. His predecessor, Pius IX, prince of fools, had lost the Papal States and most of the Church's earthly power, and he had rammed through the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, touching off a theological hooley that continues to this day. Leo XIII’s most lasting contribution is probably his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum ("Of Revolutionary Change") which attempted to develop a Catholic philosophy for the relationship between capitalism and labor that also kept the Church out of the rising conflict between the two. He supported trade unions and collective bargaining. Famously, Leo wrote:

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.

However, Leo also was quite bothered by what was called, "Americanism." He was unsettled by our insistence on a separation of church and state. There had not been another Leo until this Thursday, when a new pope was elected and took the name of Leo XIV. He was Robert Cardinal Prevost, and he was born outside Chicago. U.S. Freaking A. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Prevost’s rise to become an influential figure at the Vatican began in Dolton as it grew, taking in thousands of people moving from apartments in Chicago to new homes in the south suburb during the post-World War II boom. Catholics moving there typically landed at the St. Mary of the Assumption on the far southern edge of Chicago, straddling the line with Dolton. That’s where the Prevost family—Louis, an educator, Mildred, a librarian, and their sons Louis, John and Robert—were known at bustling St. Mary’s as dedicated and devout musicians, altar boys, lectors, and volunteers.

So he's a child of the American suburban church, like millions of other baby boomers, including me. First communions. May parades. Midnight masses at Christmas. His mother was one of those parish church ladies who kept everything running. Children going to the parish school.

Bob Prevost entered the school, with its sea of navy-and-white uniforms, before the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council modernized many rules and practices. That meant students went to mass every morning, and it was said in Latin. When the second grade had to memorize endless catechism for months to prepare for the sacraments of reconciliation and Holy Community, Angarola says, “Robert Prevost never complained.“

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 over,” she says. “Robert Prevost never folded his hands over. He was just godly. Not in an in-your-face way. It was part of his aura, like he was hand-selected, and he embraced it. And he wasn’t weird. He was nice.”

His career in the church, and his rise through its institutions, has only one major drawback, and it is a familiar one. In 2000, when he was the Chicago Provincial of the Augustinian order and he took some heat after a priest accused of sexual abuse was allowed to live in an Augustinian priory not far from a school. And there was another, more hazy one involving three girls in Peru who accused two priests in Prevost’s diocese of molesting them, and more recent allegations of a $150,000 payoff to keep them quiet.

Some accusers have claimed Prevost failed to properly investigate the allegations and covered up for the accused priest, but the diocese has firmly denied this, stating that Prevost followed proper procedures. They stated that Prevost personally received and attended to the victims, and reportedly opened an initial canonical investigation. He also encouraged the victims to take the case to the civil authorities. In July 2022, Prevost sent the results of the investigation to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) for review. His supporters stress that he has documents from the DDF and the Papal Nunciature in Peru which also indicate that he was not only attentive to the presumed victims, but that he did all required in Church law in following procedures set out for these cases.

However, in May 2025 allegations emerged that the diocese paid $150,000 to the three girls to silence them. Described as “longtime public critics of Prevost,” the girls reportedly blame Prevost for covering up their sexual abuse by the priest. The allegations, reported in InfoVaticana, described the Peruvian scandal, which was the subject of a national television report including an interview with the girls last fall, as the “stone in the shoe for Cardinal Prevost.”

Those clouds never will part. Leo XIV will have to live with them over his head for the rest of his life. So will the church he now leads.