Who is Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV who has a special link with Peru?

Even before his name was announced from the balcony of the Basilica of San Pedro, the crowd chanted “Long live the Pope.”

Robert Prevost, 69, is the 267th occupant of the San Pedro throne and will be known as Leo XIV.

He is the first American to hold the position of Pope and is also considered a Latin American cardinal due to the many years he spent as a missionary in Peru, before becoming a archbishop.

Born in Chicago on September 14, 1955, Prevost served as Monaguillo and was ordered priest in 1982. Although he moved to Peru three years later, he returned regularly to the United States to serve as a pastor and prior in his hometown.

In his first words like Pope, Leo XIV spoke with love of his predecessor Francisco.

“The weak voice still resonates in our ears, but always brave from Pope Francis, who blessed us,” he said.

“United and by the hand of God, let’s move together,” he told the crowd who cheered him.

“I was born in the United States, but my grandparents were all immigrants, French, Spanish (…) I grew up in a very Catholic family, my two parents were very committed to the parish,” Prevost said in an interview with Radio Televisión Italiana.

Son of the Spanish mother and American father, Prevost grew up in Chicago with his two brothers, Louis Martín and John Joseph.

He spent his childhood and adolescence as a student at the Minor Seminar of the Augustinian parents in his hometown and then at the University of Villanova, Pennsylvania, where he studied a degree in Mathematics.

At 22, he entered the novitiate of the order of San Agustín de Saint Louis and graduated in theology.

He was then sent to Rome, where he studied canon law. In 1987, he obtained his doctorate and that same year he was elected director of vocations and director of missions of the Augustinian province “Mother of Good Council” in Illinois, United States.

The Reverend Mark Francis, a friend of Premost since the 1970s, told Reuters that the cardinal has a special commitment to social justice.

“He was always kind and warm, and remained a voice of common sense and practical concern for the work of the Church in favor of the poor,” said Francis, who attended the seminar with Prevost and subsequently met him when they both lived in Rome in the 2000s.

“He had an ironic sense of humor, but he did not seek to be the center of attention,” added Francis, who presides over the American province of the Viatorian religious order.

Only one year after his appointment in Illinois, Prevost was sent to the Mission of Trujillo in Peru as director of the Joint Training Project for Augustinian applicants in the vicariates of Chulucanas, Iquitos and Apurímac.

And in his first speech as Pope, Prevost said in Spanish: “A particular greeting to my dear Diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru, where a faithful people have accompanied his bishop, has shared his faith and has given so much, so much, to continue being the faithful church of Jesus Christ.”

He was 33 years old when he moved to Peru, years later he was nationalized and is now remembered as a figure that worked with marginalized communities and helped tend bridges in the local church.

Jesús León Ángeles, coordinator of a Catholic group in Chiclayo who knows Prevost since 2018, told Reuters that he is a “very simple” person who went out of trouble for helping others.

León Ángeles stressed that Prevost showed special concern for Venezuelan migrants in Peru.

during his years in Peru, he exercised as a pastor, a seminar teacher, prefect of studies, ecclesiastical judge and member of the Advisory Council of the Diocese of Trujillo, in addition to leading the Augustinian seminar in that city for a decade.

He joined the Peruvian Episcopal Conference (CEP) between 2018 and 2023, of which he was second vice president, and was Apostolic Administrator of Callao between 2020 and 2021.

In 2014 he was appointed Bishop of Chiclayo, a position in which he remained until his transfer to the Vatican in 2023, when Pope Francis called him to Rome to assume as a prefect of the Dicasterio for the bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, which he led so far.

Prevost is well known among the cardinals throughout Latin America for its outstanding role as a prefect of Dicastery for bishops.

Since 80% of the cardinals who participated in the conclave were appointed by Francisco, it is not surprising that someone as prevosti was chosen.

It will be seen as a figure that favored the continuity of Francisco’s reforms in the Catholic Church. Although he is American and knows divisions within the Catholic Church, his link with Latin America also represents a continuity after a Pope originally from Argentina.

Although during his stage as a archbishop in Peru, he has not escaped the scandals of sexual abuse that have overshadowed the Church, his diocese flatly denied his participation in any attempt to cover up.

Before the conclave, the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said that, during the Cardinal College meetings in the days before the conclave, the need for a Pope with “a prophetic spirit capable of leading a church that does not locate itself, but rather knows to come out and bring light to a world marked by despair.”

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