The newly-elected Pope Leo XIV shocked his own brother back home in the United States with his choice of name, having told him to avoid the moniker.
The man once known as Cardinal Robert Prevost is the first American-born pontiff, having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago.
The pope’s brother, John Prevost, has provided insight into his newly-famous sibling’s inner life, which took him all the way to Peru before serving under Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Since the sixth century, popes have taken on a new name, that of one of the Catholic saints, upon election.
Prevost – a retired Catholic school principal – admitted that his brother had spoken to him prior to the conclave and asked him what his name should be.
‘We started rattling off names just to rattle off names,’ he said, before his brother made a now-hilarious suggestion.
‘I told him it shouldn’t be Leo because it will be the 13th,’ Prevost said, suggesting it was an unlucky number.
However, as both the pope and Prevost realized, the most recent Pope Leo was, in fact, the 13th, making this Pope Leo the 14th.
‘He must’ve done some research to see it’s actually the 14th,’ Prevost told the Daily Herald of his brother.
Pope Leo XIV’s brother suggested he felt his sibling had an ‘inkling of a chance’ to be elected.
However, ‘I really was just as surprised as everyone when they said his name.’
Prevost was speaking to his niece, the daughter of both the pope and Prevost’s other brother, Louis, in Florida when the announcement was made.
‘We both couldn’t believe it. Then the phone, the iPad, and my cellphone just went nuts.’
He gave away further details about his brother’s life, telling ABC7 that the new pope is a fan of the Chicago White Sox and not their rival Chicago Cubs, despite their mother being a lifelong Cubs fan.
He and his two brothers all knew ‘what we wanted to do very early in life,’ saying the man he once called ‘Rob’ wanted to be a priest ‘from the time he could walk.’
‘A neighbor once said he was going to be pope someday. How’s that for a prognostication?’
Prevost, 69, was born in Chicago, Illinois and began studying to become a priest with the Catholic Church at the age of 18, before going on to graduate from Villanova University in Pennsylvania with a degree in mathematics four years later.
He spent much of his early life in South America and also holds Peruvian citizenship, and was said to have been seen as the ‘least American of the Americans’ who were in the running at the Conclave.
A popular figure in the church who served as the head of Pope Francis’ vetting process for new bishop nominations, he has been notably quiet about his views on topics such as women in the clergy and same sex unions.
He waded into gender ideology while serving as a bishop in Chiclayo, Peru in 2012, saying that ‘the promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.’
Following his graduation in Pennsylvania, Prevost first went to Peru in 1985 as a missionary before being named the Roman Catholic Diocese for the Chulucanas region that same year.
Prevost – also known as Father Bob – returned to work as a pastor in Chicago in 1987 for one year before becoming the head of the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo, Peru – a role he kept for a decade.
In 1998, he was elected as the head of the Augustinian Province of Chicago, making him one of the leading religious figures in the United States.
The man he succeeded to lead the Vatican, Pope Francis, brought Prevost to Italy in 2023 and handed him a prominent post heading into the Conclave, a process where cardinals vote in secret to elect the new Pope that was watched in anticipation by millions.
Although he makes history as the first American pope, the Chicago-born religious leader has not been shy about his disapproval of President Donald Trump in the past.
He has taken so social media a number of times to criticize the Trump administration’s moves on immigration repeatedly and expressed support for progressive causes.
‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’ he said in one tweet.
The new Pope also shared several articles that address JD Vance’s stance on immigration. One of them is titled: ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’
Despite holding a prominent post at the Vatican, Prevost was not among the bookies’ favorites heading into the Conclave.
This was primarily because he is an American, with no US citizen ever holding the position of Pope before in history.
Prevost is also a Peruvian citizen, and he lived in the South American country for many years as a missionary and then archbishop.
While working under Francis, he presided over one of the most revolutionary reforms Francis made, when he added three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations to forward to the Pope.
In early 2025, Francis again showed his esteem by appointing Prevost to the most senior rank of cardinals, suggesting he would at least be Francis’ choice in any future conclave.
The Rev. Fidel Purisaca Vigil, the communications director for Prevost’s old diocese in Chiclayo where he previously served, remembered Prevost as a warm and kind man who ate breakfast with his staff each day.
‘No matter how many problems he has, he maintains good humor and joy,’ he told the Associated Press.
James Martin, a Jesuit priest who is also the editor-at-large of America Magazine, said on X after Prevost was announced as the new pope that he had similarly happy memories of the clergyman.
‘I know Pope Leo XIV to be a kind, open, humble, modest, decisive, hard-working, straightforward, trustworthy, and down-to-earth man. A brilliant choice. May God bless him,’ he said in a post.
Prevost enters the papacy not without some scandal in his past, and some have already pointed to an incident over two decades ago when he became embroiled in the Catholic Church’s child abuse controversy.
In 2000, he came under scrutiny for allowing Father James Ray, an Augustinian priest who had been suspended from the ministry nine years before due to allegations of sexual abuse of minors, to reside at his St John Stone Friary in Chicago.
He would go on to take a public stance against the way that the Catholic Church handled the pedophilia scandal, telling La Republica in 2019 that it must move away from its culture of cover-ups.
‘We reject the cover-up and secrecy, that does a lot of damage, because we have to help the people who have suffered from the bad act,’ he said.
He urged victims to come forward, adding: ‘Many times it was shut up and don’t talk, you can’t ask for that.
‘On behalf of the Church we want to tell people that if there was any offense, if they suffered or are victims of the bad actions of a priest to come and denounce it, to act for the good of the Church, of the person and the community.’