Ten Things We Learned About Pope Leo XIV

He is the first missionary pope, and he visited more of the world before his election than any predecessor.

Of his forty-three years as a priest, twenty-two were spent as a missionary in northern Peru — in a vicariate the Augustinians built up beginning in 1963 at the request of Pope John XXIII. Only four-and-a-half of those forty-three years were spent in the United States.

As Prior General of the Augustinians, he was elected to two six-year terms — twelve years that required him to visit every Augustinian community on earth, twice. By the time the conclave called his name, he had set foot in more than fifty countries. No pope before him had traveled so widely before his election.

Among the friars he was famous for one missionary virtue in particular: he ate whatever was put in front of him. What my hosts give me is their best, Father Tom paraphrased him — just like you and I would give our best to anyone who visited us.

He almost chose Augustine. He chose Leo because the Church must stand at the center of the AI revolution.

Every cardinal entering the conclave is required to have a name ready in case the votes fall his way. Cardinal Prevost told his Augustinian brothers he had seriously considered taking the name Augustine — he would have been Augustine I, the first pope ever to bear it.

Instead, he chose Leo, and he was explicit about the reason. Pope Leo XIII reigned from 1878 to 1903 and wrote Rerum Novarum — the encyclical that gave the modern world the forty-hour work week, the dignity of labor, the right of workers to organize, and the end of child labor in factories.

It is, Father Tom suggested, the defining intuition of this pontificate: that artificial intelligence is to our century what the steam engine was to Leo XIII’s — a remaking of human work and dignity that the Church cannot afford to watch from the sidelines.

He went from 18-to-1 in Vegas to over 100 votes on the third ballot — because the cardinals knew him from the Dicastery for Bishops.

One hundred thirty-three electors entered the Sistine Chapel. He needed eighty-nine. By the third ballot, he had well over a hundred. “Those cardinals were unified,” Father Tom said.

The popular wisdom said an American could never be elected. The deeper wisdom said something else. Pope Francis had spent his pontificate naming cardinals from the peripheries — from places like Tonga, where 11,000 Catholics live among 120,000 souls. Critics worried these cardinals would not know each other well enough to elect anyone. They were right that the cardinals did not know each other. They were wrong about what mattered.

“What we think won’t happen,” Father Tom said, “the Holy Spirit says: think what you want.”

Fifty-six years of formation, a cross full of relics, and a community he still eats with four nights a week.

He left the eighth grade to enter the Augustinians’ high school seminary in Holland, Michigan — a boarding school hundreds of miles from his Dolton, Illinois home. He was thirteen or fourteen years old. “Imagine the faith of his parents,” Father Tom said. He has been forming as an Augustinian for fifty-six years.

The pectoral cross he wore the night he was elected — the cross he still wears today — was a gift from the order when he became cardinal. It contains six Augustinian relics, including those of Augustine and his mother Monica. “He wasn’t alone up there,” Father Tom said. “Augustine was there next to his heart.”

An Apple Watch, an Illinois driver’s license, a closet full of Peeps, and a teller who hung up on him.

Two months into his pontificate, the Pope called his bank in South Chicago to change his phone number. He answered every security question correctly. “I’m sorry, sir,” the teller told him, “you’ll have to come in person.” He pressed her: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” She hung up on him.

Father Tom had no patience for the soft pieties about the man. He is, in his telling, ordinary — a White Sox fan who once acknowledged four Minnesota teenagers shouting his team’s name from the crowd; a former substitute physics teacher at St. Rita High School filling in for a colleague who liked to take his sailboat out when the weather turned; a tech-savvy correspondent who replies to most emails personally and signs them, lately, just “L.”

His first words to the world from the loggia of St. Peter’s were five: Peace be with you all. When the Risen Christ stood among his disciples in the Upper Room, he said four. The fifth word, Father Tom suggested, was the whole point.

His parents sent a fourteen-year-old boy hundreds of miles away to seminary. That faith made the pope.

Robert Prevost grew up in Dolton, Illinois — a town that, Father Tom noted, has had its share of bad news in recent years. “Pope Leo,” he said, “is good news for them.”

His mother was a librarian at Mendel Catholic High School and sang in the parish choir. His father was the principal of a Catholic grammar school. The Prevost family belonged to St. Mary’s Parish in Dolton, where all three sons were Catholic-educated from the start.

When their youngest was thirteen or fourteen, they let him leave the eighth grade and travel hundreds of miles to St. Augustine’s High School Seminary in Holland, Michigan — a boarding school where he would live, study, and pray under Augustinian formation. “Imagine the faith of those parents,” Father Tom said. “That they would send their youngest, at fourteen, to live so far from home.”

A canon law doctorate from the Lateran in his pocket — and his first request was for the Augustinian missions in northern Peru.

Father Prevost earned his doctorate in canon law from one of Rome’s great universities — the Lateran. With that credential, Father Tom said, he could have served any archdiocese in the world. He could have worked for the Vatican. He could have walked into any chancery office and been welcomed.

He asked instead to go to Chulucanas — a vicariate in northern Peru that the Augustinians had begun building in 1963, when Pope John XXIII asked the religious orders of the United States to send ten percent of their members to the missions. The first Augustinian bishop in Peru was Father John McNab — once the principal of Mendel Catholic High School, the school where Father Prevost’s mother worked as a librarian.

Pope Leo’s years in Chulucanas were not a detour. They were the road. “You really need to know his background,” Father Tom said, “because that’s what shaped him.”

On day two of his pontificate, he slipped out of Rome unannounced — to place his papacy in her hands.

Mater Boni Consilii — Our Mother of Good Counsel — is the most common Marian title in the Augustinian tradition. The shrine of her image is in Genazzano, a small town in the hills southeast of Rome. The Chicago Province of the Augustinians, which Pope Leo led for years as Provincial, is dedicated to her.

His first full day as pope was day one. On day two, with the world still adjusting to the news, he went to Genazzano. Unannounced. He prayed before the image and placed his entire pontificate under her patronage.

It was a small, quiet, deeply Augustinian act. The Holy Father did not announce it; an Augustinian friar took the only known photograph. The next day, his third as pope, he visited the Augustinian Curia at Santa Monica — the order’s headquarters in Rome — to keep that thread of communion intact.

Vocation inquiries to the Augustinians in his first week as pope: thirty-four thousand.

In the first seven days of his pontificate, the Augustinian vocations website received more than 34,000 hits. “The Leo effect,” Father Tom called it. He has been a vocation director for sixteen years. He has never been busier.

The Midwest Augustinians have two pre-novices in formation this year. Six more are entering this August. Father Tom told the Pope as much when they sat together in his apartment.

The Holy Father’s life is its own argument. The young men hearing the call are responding to the witness of an Augustinian who left eighth grade for seminary, spent twenty-two years in a foreign country, and now serves as the visible head of the Church on earth — and still, somehow, eats dinner with his brothers four nights a week.

The pope has jokes — and he is happy to make Father Tom McCarthy more famous than himself.

When Father Tom flew to Rome and was finally face-to-face with the Holy Father in his apartment, he did what Augustinians do: he gave the fraternal embrazio, the brotherly embrace, without thinking. He hugged the pope.

Walking out, he confessed it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if I was supposed to do that.” The Pope’s reply: “No — they were about to shoot you.”

When two large bags of letters and gifts followed Father Tom into the apartment, the Pope looked at them and asked, “What are you doing — moving in?”

A pope who can take a joke and tell one is a pope who is unafraid of his own humanity. The dignity of the office is not threatened by the lightness of the man who holds it. Father Tom told the room: “If he was here, he’d be sitting right here with us. He’d be enjoying the refreshments afterward. He is just a normal, normal guy.”