John Prevost knew this was going to happen. “They are going to scrutinize left and right,” said the older brother of the new Pope, when he started … to digest the news of his appointment. What he still did not know is that this scrutiny would splash him and his whole family. Fortunately Leo XIV has, in his brother’s words, “the patience of a saint,” but not all mortals can say the same. In the early hours, this educated and good -natured teacher, just one year old than the pontiff, replied the phone to the press and opened the doors of his house to the cameras with which he shared his joy and disbelief, but soon the natural morbidity of the human being began to shoot.
«first we look at what clothes he had when he went to the balcony. Then, when we knew it was from Chicago, if it was going to be a fan of the Cubs or the White Sox », he blushed his parishioners yesterday the auxiliary bishop of the cathedral of the sacred name, Lawrence Sullivan, who dedicated the mass to pray for the Holy Father. They were valid questions, because in Chicago the two baseball teams fidignly represent the sociocultural gap of the city. If it had been from the Cubs, as it was originally said, it would have been like born in Vallecas and be a fan of Real Madrid.
The Premost raised in a working neighborhood in southern Chicago, diverse and hard, where it still bothers to enter taxis into the dark of the night. The red brick house that the parents bought in the 212 EAST 141 of Place Street in Dolton with a mortgage of 42 dollars a month in 1949 has passed through many tenants since they sold it, but it has just returned to the market a few months ago with a hand of new paint that adequates it for the occasion. The parade of journalists looking for the roots of Leo XIV on southern side of Chicago had yesterday ecstatic to the oldest neighbors in the neighborhood, still able to dust off some memory about the sweet and friendly child to which their parents, catechists, guided by the devotee path of the Church.
“It was the most judicious”
John was confused with his brother often. Some even thought they were twins, but the major rod says that Robert was judicious, the one who gave him advice. And in that tonic, it became a solid man of church, cult of canon law and tanned in the missions of Peru. He also knows how to deal with the press. While his brother dispatched right yesterday with CNN and Chicago Sunctimes, he observed the lost calls of the new Pope and quickly called him back to congratulate him live. Leon XIV declined his proposal to speak with the journalist and gave him indications to make his suitcase and travel to Rome immediately, to accompany him at the premiere of a pontificate with whom his parents, devout Catholics, could not even dream.
Yesterday the press continued to play the door and camping on the grass of that suburbs of New Lenox (Ilinois). The public debate had gone from the cape and the fans club to the color of his blood. His maternal grandparents were black, or at least mulattos, determined the genealogist Jari Honora for The New York Times. Originally it was said that Mildred Martínez, the mother of the Pope born in Chicago in 1912, was Dominican of Spanish descent, but according to the archives in which the researcher has raised, his parents were registered as blacks when they married in New Orleans in 1887. “Both were people of color, there is no doubt,” said the expert. It was this maternal grandfather, Joseph Martínez, who said he had Dominican roots, although some files attribute to him in Haiti, the French black half of the island of Hispaniola. His trade, liar pure, while his wife Louise Baquié was already born in the neighborhood of the slaves released from New Orleans.
The genealogical history of the American Pope was increasingly sinking into the Creole roots and captivated the imagination of those who already saw him as the fifth -signs of the US of mixed breeds that claim a wing the country, confronted with the racial admiration by the European Nordics who professes without complexes the ‘America First’ of Donald Trump.
The curious threw the intimacy of Mildred Prevost in his tomb in Chicago and scrutinized the obituary of the devotee librarian, “beloved wife of the superintendent of the public school 167, fervent mother of Louis Martin, John J. and the (then) Reverend Robert Prevost,” said the scheme. Instead of flowers, contributions to the Augustinian missions of Peru will be appreciated ».
None lived to see him converted into a bishop or cardinal, but of missions in South America, with the rowing cassock and hands full of earth. “They would never have imagined this,” he said ecstatic and a little nostalgic John Prevost, who confirmed to New York Times the origins of his grandparents in New Orleans, but denied that his family identifies himself with having black blood.
The scrutiny was becoming irritating. He began evoking childhood games at the school already missing from Santa María de la Asunción, where his brother intended to teach mass, while other children played to be police or firefighters. John enjoyed dustying those memories, showing journalists black and white photos of his university border, and projecting him as someone “neither too much to the left, nor too to the right”, which will keep the moral compass of the church focused. His choice tried to neutralize Bishop Lawrence Sullivan in the Cathedral, “he does not have a political reading, but human,” he said. «He will be a lawyer of the poor and the homeless. It will rise to give voice to those who do not have it and the most needy ».
“It won’t get quiet”
This was also felt by John’s neighbor, Sandy, who along with her husband watches over the septuagenarian Master retired, who yesterday traveled in first class to Rome turned into the Pope’s brother. “The voice is going to raise those who are being persecuted in this country, I’m sorry in my heart.” John himself had admitted in his interviews that the bad treatment of immigrants is something against what his brother “will not remain silent.”
Nor will the press stay there. He will question his management on sexual scandals and there will be those who look for his own. Some media aired vocational doubts in their past from a phrase that Robert told the RAI before his consecration: “When one is young he thinks: I better leave this life and get married, I want to have children and lead a life say that normal, like the one I had seen in my family.”
But John no longer answered any more questions. I drew the knuckles at the door, silenced the phone and finished making the suitcase in the dark. In New Lenox’s house, a shadow did not move until a friend arrived to pick it up. And in a seen and did not see disappeared with the suitcase in the direction of the airport. Curiosity is the first step towards the truth, but the second is usually the scandal. The Premosts are devotees of knowledge and, at this step, they will learn to become addicted to mystery.
Related news :