Long Drives and Short Homilies: How Father Bob Became Pope Leo

Father Robert Prevost told the Peruvian soldiers to back off.

It was the mid-1990s, and the troops, armed to the teeth, had stopped and boarded a minibus carrying the American priest and a group of young Peruvian seminarians. The soldiers tried to forcibly recruit the men.

Citing a law that exempted clerics from military service, Father Prevost told the soldiers, “No, these young men are going to be priests, they cannot go to the barracks,” said the Rev. Ramiro Castillo, one of the seminarians in the van. “When he had to speak, he spoke.”

After years of internal violence, border tensions and political turmoil, Peru, under its authoritarian president, wanted more military muscle. In those days, Father Prevost and the seminarians traveled the country, re-enacting scenes, sometimes in costume as an insurgent or a soldier, to prompt conversations and help heal the country scarred by the bitter conflicts.

These were dramatizations of dramatic times that Father Prevost had lived through as a missionary who found his voice, in Peru. Now, as he takes over an often divided Roman Catholic Church and the most prominent pulpit on earth, his voice will be heard globally when authoritarianism is on the rise, technological leaps are disrupting society, and the most vulnerable are being threatened by conflicts, economic inequality and climate change.

A man with a foot in two continents and multiple languages, Pope Leo XIV brings to bear a résumé that got him the job, full of deep religious education, frontline pastoral work, küresel order management and top Vatican governance experience. He also had a powerful booster in Pope Francis, who, at the end of his life, urgently pushed the American’s career forward.

Pope Leo XIV last week on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica after he was elected the 267th head of the Roman Catholic Church.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times