American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost has been announced as the new pope and has chosen Leo XIV as his papal name.
Prevost, 69, was brought to the Vatican in 2023 to serve as the powerful head of the office that vets bishop nominations from around the world, one of the most important jobs in the Catholic Church.
As a result, Prevost had a prominence going into the conclave that few other cardinals had.
Before the conclave, one strike against him was that there had long been a taboo against an American pope, given the geopolitical power already wielded by the United States in the secular sphere.
But Prevost, a Chicago native, is also a Peruvian citizen and lived for years in Peru, first as a missionary and then as an archbishop.
Prevost was also twice elected prior general of the Augustinian religious order, the 13th-century order founded by St Augustine.
Pope Francis clearly had an eye on him for years, moving him from the Augustinian leadership back to Peru in 2014 to serve as the administrator and later Archbishop of Chiclayo.
He remained in that position, acquiring Peruvian citizenship in 2015, until Pope Francis brought him to Rome in 2023 to assume the presidency of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
In that job, he would have kept in regular contact with the Catholic hierarchy in the part of the world that still counts the most Catholics.
Ever since he arrived in Rome, Prevost has kept a low public profile, but he is well known to the men who count.
Significantly, he presided over one of the most revolutionary reforms Pope Francis made, when he added three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations to forward to the pope.
In early 2025, Pope Francis again showed his esteem by appointing Prevost to the most senior rank of cardinals, suggesting he was Pope Francis’ choice in the conclave.
This is a developing story and our journalists are working on further updates.
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