Pope Leo XIV
Pope Leo XIV is the first pope born in the United States. Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955 to a father of French and Italian descent who was a school superintendent and a mother of Spanish descent who was a librarian, he served as an altar boy and entered the Order of Saint Augustine after taking a mathematics degree at Villanova. He was ordained in 1982, took a doctorate in canon law at the Angelicum in Rome, and went to Peru in 1985, where he spent most of the following two decades — running a seminary in Trujillo, teaching canon law, serving as a judicial vicar, and working in rural parishes. He took Peruvian citizenship, and speaks Spanish and Italian fluently along with French and Portuguese. He was elected prior general of the Augustinians in 2001 and served two six-year terms, which required constant travel across the order's houses worldwide. Francis appointed him Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru in 2015, and in 2023 brought him to Rome as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops — the office that vets and recommends episcopal appointments worldwide, and one of the most consequential posts in the curia. He was made a cardinal the same year. He was elected on 8 May 2025, on the fourth ballot of a two-day conclave following Francis's death. He chose the name in reference to Leo XIII, whose Rerum Novarum addressed the industrial revolution, and has said that the church now faces a comparable upheaval in artificial intelligence and its effect on work and human dignity. He is the second pope from the Americas, after his immediate predecessor.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: pope, cleric
