Long before he was the successor of St. Peter, Pope Leo XIV had a different name to the faithful of St. Joseph the Worker Parish in Chulucanas.
“We called him Father Robertito, because we were very close to him,” Elena Lozada Seminario told the National Catholic Reporter inside the church where a then-30-year-old Fr. Robert Prevost once served in northern Peru in 1985. “He was always visiting the communities, going to the countryside. People loved him because he was so simple, so humble.”
As a young missionary and priest of only three years, Prevost was sent to Chulucanas where he spent just one year before moving on to minister for over a decade in the coastal city of Trujillo, but his time there left an indelible mark on the future pope’s vision of the church.
The pastoral model he encountered — rooted in synodal governance, lay leadership and social mission — shaped his later ministry in Trujillo and, decades later, guided his approach as bishop of Chiclayo, a city just four hours south of where he first arrived in the country.
The Chulucanas in which Prevost found himself was “a very small town, very poor, the houses were made of sticks and straws,” said Lola Chávez Hernández, another parishioner of St. Joseph the Worker. Yet Prevost “stood alongside the poor, the most simple, the most humble. That’s where he was, and he also learned from his predecessors, from those whose authority he was under, like Msgr. Juan [McNabb] and other priests who had been here. So he came here with that conviction to serve the poor.”
The future pope would only spend one year in Chulucanas before returning to the United States, yet his time there would instill in him a participatory image of the church that he worked to implement time and again throughout his ecclesial career.
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter and Justin McLellan, where this article originally appeared.
