Dan Turley, O.S.A., was not among the people surprised that his friend and fellow Augustinian, Cardinal Robert Prevost, had been elected pope. “I was not totally shocked. I was sort of even expecting it, you could say.” He had snapped awake in the middle of the night at the time he believes the world’s cardinals had been electing his old friend to the highest office in the church.
“I asked myself, ‘I wonder if he has been chosen…’” He can’t help but chuckle as he shares the story.
“I know the new pope, Leo XIV, very well,” Bishop Turley says, speaking from Chicago where he has “retired” to work with Augustinian pre-novices and assist with the archdiocese’s confirmation program. “He’s just a wonderful person…. If you commission him in something, you delegate something to him, you know that it’s going to be done and that it’s going to be done well.”
“I know how well prepared he is for this most important mission as our pope,” Bishop Turley says. “With the grace of God, I’m sure he’s going to be a wonderful minister of our Lord as pope.”
Kevin Flaherty, S.J., served in Peru for 30 years and first met the man he knew as “Roberto” when then-Father Prevost was serving as the Augustinian formation director in Trujillo, Peru. “I could not believe it when I heard his name. I heard first, ‘Roberto’ and I thought, ‘My God, it can’t be; is it Prevost?’”
Father Flaherty, like hundreds of Vaticanistas, journalists and church analysts “had written him off,” presuming that as a North American, Cardinal Prevost had no chance of being elected. “I think it’s a real compliment that the cardinals don’t see him as an American, but as an international person who bridges two worlds.”
Father Flaherty points out that the pope’s most recent role as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops means that he has pored over reports from dioceses around the world, considering: “What are their needs; what are their challenges? Who are the potential leaders of the church?”
“He knows intimately the church and the world through the last two years,” Father Flaherty notes, augmenting the significant international experience Pope Leo had already acquired in two terms as Augustinian prior general.
Father Flaherty is finishing a sabbatical at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Tex., and preparing for a new assignment in campus ministry at Loyola University in Chicago. Father Flaherty describes Pope Leo XIV as a person of “deep spirituality, easy to be with,” armed with a dry and ready sense of humor.
“I’m still ecstatic…you feel the church so close,” he says. “All of a sudden somebody you know and you’ve worked with, and you’ve called each other by your first names, is standing on that balcony of St. Peter’s. It’s a great joy.”
Emergency call
Young Father Robert Prevost first arrived in Peru in 1985 during a time of crisis, the aftermath of devastating El Niño rains that had left thousands of people homeless. Assigned to Peru as an aide to the late Bishop John McNabb, O.S.A., his official work was set aside for a time, Bishop Turley recalls.
“He was doing everything he could to help because it was an emergency. People’s homes were knocked down. There was so much need—he got his hands dirty.” Father Prevost would unfortunately have to deal with El Niño events and the devastation that accompany them many times during his years in Peru.
In his first years in Peru, when not working in Augustinian formation, which included raising the money for a new seminary and supervising its construction, Father Prevost served as the administrator of two parishes.
Father Flaherty recalls Chulucanas, a large, rural diocese in the north of Peru near Ecuador, as “an area that is semiarid, almost the desert, and through irrigation, they have some agriculture, and then you go up into the foothills of the Andes and even beyond.” Father Prevost’s work brought him into regular contact with campesino and Indigenous communities of great poverty but also deep spirituality, according to Father Flaherty. “It’s an area where you really know the poor.”
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With thanks to the America Magazine and Kevin Clarke, where this article originally appeared.
