Pope Leo XIV was a lot of firsts for the Catholic Church. Among other things, he was the first Augustinian and the first Peruvian citizen to become pope, as well as the first pope born after World War II.
But most people know him as the first American – and, by extension, the first Illinoisan – to ever be named the Bishop of Rome.
But who was Leo when he was Robert Prevost from the Chicago suburb of Dolton? That's the question that All Things Considered co-host Scott Detrow and NPR religion and spirituality senior editor Daniel Burke sought to answer.
Detrow and Burke track his journey to the papacy in the new book, “American Pope: Leo XIV's Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City.”
Ben Singson spoke with them for more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Ben Singson
All right, so my first question for you two is, you don't need to be Catholic to know who Leo XIV is, but I think the question that a lot of people would have going into this book is, "Who was this guy before he was Pope Leo?" What was he like in day-to-day life?
Scott Detrow
It's interesting how normal he was up until the minute that he became pope. In recent years, he's a very high-level official in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis almost takes him under his wing and seems to be, in retrospect, training him how to be pope. He's meeting with Pope Francis for hours at a time on Saturday mornings at the Vatican. And he's in charge of all of the bishops in the world, basically. Very important job, but at the same time, unless you were a really intense church person, you wouldn't really recognize him on the street or know much about him. So, we have these stories of Robert Prevost going to the gym in Rome or going and stopping by this Chinese place to get takeout or going to get pizza. And he's playing Wordle with his friends as became known around the world. He just lived this very normal life until suddenly he's elected pope and is instantly one of the most famous and influential people in the world. And this past week, we saw him gathering crowds of a million people in Paris. But it's remarkable, the way I think about covering politics is if you want to be president, it's like 5 to 10 years of your life of slowly trying to build your influence, slowly trying to become more and more of a public figure. It's not like that in this case. He was going into the conclave as one of 133 cardinals and then suddenly the momentum gathers and he emerges as the Pope.
Ben Singson
Gotcha. You spoke with dozens upon dozens of Leo's associates for this book. What surprised the two of you in the course of doing research for this book?
Daniel Burke
So, I think one of the most surprising and interesting things about Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, is he has a really unique personality. He is at one time a kind of quiet and reserved person, but at the same time he's held all of these really important leadership positions, both within, he's a member of the Order of St. Augustine, which is this Catholic order that takes its inspiration from St. Augustine. And he held these leadership positions there. And as Scott said, he was a cardinal, but in meetings and the way he carried himself, he was always listening to other people, letting them talk, hearing them out, and then at the end kind of making a decision. And so, he seems like almost like this mild-mannered, like, businessman. But at the same time, he's got this, like, courageous side of him that will go to really poor areas of Peru to help out. He will go to Nigeria at a time when there was, you know, wars between Christians and Muslims. He will go there at a time when Nigerians themselves wouldn't go. So, he combines this kind of really unique personality in that he's quiet and reserved, but also personally very kind of courageous and putting himself out there and leading people even in these difficult situations.
Ben Singson
Both of you note that neither the Vatican nor Leo himself spoke to you for this book. But I was just curious, did researching and writing this book give either of you any degree of insight as to why the Vatican selected him to succeed Pope Francis?
Scott Detrow
I think he emerged at the conclave in a way that surprised a lot of the cardinals there as kind of the best of both worlds. Pope Francis had appointed about 80% of the cardinals who would be selecting the next pope. So, a lot of the people going into that conclave knew that they wanted to find somebody to continue Francis's legacy. And it was very clear that Cardinal Prevost was somebody that Pope Francis had entrusted to some of his most important roles. You know, now Leo is in charge of selecting bishops those last two years of Francis's papacy. Francis knew he was running out of time, and he wanted to work with somebody to appoint younger bishops who could keep carrying out his mission into the church for decades to come. At the same time, we talked to cardinals like Timothy Dolan, the former cardinal from New York City, who was a Francis skeptic, who was somebody who wanted to see a change. He said that a lot of cardinals thought that Francis was too off the cuff, too improv. He would kind of make decisions on a spur of the moment and change wide courses of church strategy on a whim. They wanted somebody more predictable. So as the meetings before the conclave went on, a lot of the people who wanted to see a change from Francis also saw Prevost as their candidate. They thought he was somebody who was meticulous, who was strategic, who thought through every step he was going to take. Dolan told us at one point that he asked another cardinal, "What do you know of Prevost?" And then the other cardinal said, "Well, he runs a good meeting." And Dolan said, "Well, that's faint praise." It doesn't really seem like a compliment. And they said he thought about it. And he said, "No, we actually do need somebody who knows how to run a good meeting." So very quickly, because of those two factors at the same time, After the first ballot, it's clear to a lot of cardinals that there's one path forward and it's the first-ever American pope.
Ben Singson
For the people that you spoke with, like, how do you think their personal knowledge of Robert Prevost has influenced how they think about Leo XIV's time as pope?
Daniel Burke
That's a great question. That is something that's been rolling around my brain since we've been talking to people who knew Robert Prevost since he was 14 years old. So, you imagine playing baseball at the seminary fields with this guy, the skinny little guy who's not that athletic. He's on the tennis team. He likes the chess club. So, he goes on to become Pope. And I think it has to be, like, such a unique experience. A lot of them told me that they cried when he came out on the balcony on May 8, 2025. It was an emotional, a powerful experience, but also a little bit of like a jolt that someone you know that you grew up with in Illinois is now the leader of a 1.4 billion member church. I think it was striking. At the same time, they thought this is the perfect guy. They'd known him since he was very young, as I said, and if there were ever a person in their life they thought was spiritual enough, was calm enough, was a good leader, it was Robert Prevost.
Ben Singson
You go over his time in seminary school as well as his preaching abroad. He always seems to be in the midst of politically turbulent situations, both within the church itself and the world as a whole. Do you think that time and that experience has influenced kind of the direction that he wants to take the church as pope?
Scott Detrow
Absolutely. I think one thing that we were reporting on this book throughout the first year of his papacy. So we'd be kind of - our noses back 20, 30 years in time going through archives, interviewing people about them. And then we'd see what he's doing as pope in the real time. And there were so many times where we talked to each other and said, "Wow, there's clear parallels here." One thing that you've seen him prioritize as pope is that he is trying to bring two sides of a fractured political church together. That is a clear priority for him. And you see that whenever he does a big announcement or gesture that kind of more liberal people in the church are excited about, very quickly he will do something that conservatives in the church are excited about as well. That's something that we saw when he was a seminarian in the late '70s when two friends were arguing with each other and he stopped them on the street and he said, "I'm trying to be a bridge between the two of you. That's something that we saw when he was a bishop in Peru where he took over this pretty conservative diocese. The Opus Dei order had run it for half a century, and a lot of the Opus Dei priests were pretty conservative, pretty doctrine-focused, pretty rigid in their views of the church. He's slowly trying to get them to be more of a church out in the streets, be more of a missionary church. He's winning them over, and then he's also trying to reach out to these disaffected, you know, liberation theologists, liberals who had felt pushed out of that church. He's able to bring them both on the same page. And I feel like there aren't that many people in the world who could bring those two wings together. So you see that throughout his life and you're kind of seeing him try to do that on a global scale now.
Ben Singson
All right. Scott Detrow and Daniel Burke, authors of American Pope. Thank you very much.
