In one of Chicago’s south suburbs, while other boys were playing cops and robbers, the future Pope Leo XIV would pretend to hold Mass in the basement of his family’s small brick home, reading from scripture and distributing disk-shaped candy wafers to his two older brothers.
“Some people said, ‘That guy’s going to be pope one day,’” his eldest, Louis Prevost, 73, recalled with a laugh.
When the weather permitted, a young Robert Francis Prevost would play priest on the top step of a stoop, presiding over an outdoor Mass with a congregation made up of a handful of neighborhood children sitting on the lower steps, said Holly Boblink, 71, who lived on the same block.
The little boy who last week became the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics grew up in an ethnically mixed and devout family in the tight-knit, working-class village of Dalton, Illinois. Their hub was a now-shuttered Catholic parish and school in a dense metro area that reflected not only the rich cultural tapestry of the US Catholic Church but of America itself.
A deep sense of community and compassion helped shape the man who would succeed the popular Pope Francis at a time of turbulence for both the church and the nation, according to immediate relatives and others who grew up with him.
“None of us was wealthy,” said Marianne Angarola, 69, who attended Catholic grammar school with the future pope. “But we never felt like we were wanting or needing anything. We were cared for and provided for. And we felt protected and loved.”
When Prevost, 69, stepped out last Thursday onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square to greet Vatican City’s adoring throngs – just the second pope from the Americas, after his most immediate predecessor, and the first from the United States – he was nearly 8,000 miles from the railroad tracks that crisscross the streets of the village he once called home.
The youngest son of an educator and a rosary lady
In a place where a stranger might just as soon tell you their Catholic parish as their neighborhood, the Prevosts were regulars at St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in the Riverdale area on Chicago’s South Side.
The father of the boy who would become pope, Louis Prevost, was of French and Italian descent, and his mother was of Spanish descent, according to the Vatican.
“My dad’s parents came over on a boat. They were orphans and so there you can’t really find roots for them,” said the middle of the three Prevost brothers, John.
Their mom, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1912, not long after her parents migrated from New Orleans, said a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection who shared his research with CNN.
“The family were free people of color prior to the Civil War. When they moved to Chicago between 1910 and 1912, they ‘passed’ into the White world,” Jari C. Honora said, citing a 1900 Census record listing Mildred Prevost’s parents as Black residents of the Louisiana city’s 7th Ward, a cultural melting pot.
Louis and Mildred grew up in Chicago – dad on the South Side, mom on the North Side – and met at DePaul University, John Prevost said.
“They used to joke through the years (that) my dad met my mom when he was working on his master’s degree, and he gave her one of the questionnaires that he was working on,” he said.
Louis Prevost became an educator and school superintendent in Cook County. His wife was a librarian and active in parish life as a member of the St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society who played the organ, lent her “operatic voice” to the choir and established the school’s first library in a small basement room, her middle son and former students who remember the family said.
Mildred Prevost also was one of the “hot lunch ladies” who volunteered to make sloppy joes for students twice a month and was part of the St. Mary’s Players, performing in “The Music Man” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Among the recipes she contributed to a cookbook published by parishioners was one for the puffy fried dough known as beignets, a mainstay in New Orleans, Angarola recalled.
“She was a fun person,” recalled another parishioner, Noelle Neis, 69.
The Prevost home already was bustling with two little boys when the youngest son, Robert Francis, was born on September 14, 1955, in Chicago.
‘The seed was planted and it grew’
Dolton’s economy relied heavily on now-closed steel mills and factories on the outskirts of the village. Noisy freight trains crawled through day and night, stalling vehicle and pedestrian traffic at railroad crossings and dictating the pace of life for many residents.
“We would get caught by the train and we wouldn’t get into Mass until the homily – the sermon – was concluding, and this did not make my mother happy,” Angarola recalled.
Pope Leo’s life in pictures
“I remember going to church and you could see the train in the distance and you’d have to beat the train so you wouldn’t be late for church,” Neis said. “There were two big sets of tracks. I’m sure the Prevosts had to go over those same tracks. My mother insisted we leave one hour early for a 3-mile drive to church.”
Nattily attired, the Prevost family sat in the same pew – right behind Neis’ family – every Sunday at St. Mary of the Assumption, so named for the belief Jesus’ mother’s body was “assumed” into heaven upon her death.
“We would hear his mom singing, so we knew they were there,” Neis said. Louis occasionally was a lector, reading designated verses aloud from the Bible during the first part of Mass. The brothers were all altar boys.
At one point, the Prevost family got an organ, and the future pope took the six free lessons that came with its purchase, John Prevost recalled. He then taught the middle brother how to play, a nod to his skills as both a quick study and a natural leader.
“I never really thought of him as my little brother,” Prevost, who still speaks with his younger sibling by phone almost every day, said last week. “He was always Rob.”
The youngest Prevost son also was a standout student, especially in religion class.
‘Robert Prevost, he would never sigh,’ the nun chided
Every school day at St. Mary of the Assumption began with Mass before students had breakfast at their desks, since there was no cafeteria.
Some students would get frustrated when the nuns lined them up to answer questions about the Catholic Catechism. The future Pope Leo, by contrast, was the smartest and best-behaved, Angarola recalled.
“It was a little torturous,” she remembered. “There were a lot of sighs. Like, you know, ‘Here we go.’ Our religion teacher in second grade … she would use (him) as an example: ‘You know, Robert Prevost, he would never sigh,’ like we were doing.”
Indeed, Prevost’s path to the priesthood began at an early age.
“I do remember when he was in eighth grade, order after order after order came to the house to talk up their order,” John Prevost recalled of the recruiting tactics of the various religious communities that train and manage priests. “What made him choose the Augustinian order, I couldn’t tell you, but maybe it was the sense of community.”
Robert Prevost soon left home to attend St. Augustine Seminary High School, just around and up the Lake Michigan shore, and only returned for summers and holidays, his brother said.
“When we dropped him off for freshman year of high school, the drive home was very sad,” said John Prevost, who went on to serve as a parish choir conductor and organist and to work as a teacher and principal in Catholic schools. “No one was going to talk him out of it …
“Somewhere the seed was planted and it grew.”
‘A place where all mankind is treated equally’
The future Pope Leo later attended Villanova University, an Augustinian school in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he received a Master of Divinity in 1982 before earning a Doctor of Canon Law degree at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome.
He then spent much of his working life in Peru, where he was a missionary, leading the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo. He returned to Illinois in 1999 to lead the Order of Saint Augustine’s Midwestern province, and, starting in 2001, led the Augustinians globally — based in Rome, but traveling widely.
In 2014 he returned to Peru — where he became a naturalized citizen, receiving a Peruvian passport — and in 2015 was named bishop of Chiclayo. In 2023, Prevost returned to the Vatican, where Francis tapped him to lead the department that oversees the selection of new bishops.
The boy whose deep sense of community and compassion was molded by his experiences in the village of Dolton was made a cardinal later that year. A week ago, he was chosen as the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
“I think the world is in pain right now, and I think many people, myself included, want to contribute thoughtfully to getting to a place where all mankind is treated equally and that basic necessities, at the very least, are met,” Angarola said as she considered the South Side kid she once knew now at the helm of such a mission.
“And wouldn’t this be incredible,” she said, “if this was the purpose of the path that got established for Pope Leo XIV to actually be able to make it happen.”
CNN’s Eric Bradner, Whitney Wild, Andy Rose, Taylor Romine, Matthew Rehbein, Michelle Krupa, Elizabeth Wolfe and Christopher Lamb contributed to this report.