How Father Bob became Pope Leo
But back then, when all seemed certain, he revealed his doubts to his father.
“Maybe it would be better I leave this life and get married; I want to have children, a normal life,” the future pope, in a 2024 interview on Italian television, recalled saying. His father responded, he said, in a very human but deep way, telling his youngest son that, yes, “the intimacy between him and my mom” was important, but so was the intimacy between a priest and the love of God.
The class of potential priests whittled down over the years — some got girlfriends, others got homesick and others lost their calling. In the end, only 13 out of several dozen, including Prevost, made it to graduation.
He had expected to attend an Illinois seminary for Augustinians, but it folded, so he instead went to Villanova, in 1973. He majored in math and attended Masses that were sometimes interrupted by shouts of “Hoagie Man!” when a guy selling subs passed by. Prevost and the others on the priesthood track lived together on campus in a wing of St. Mary’s Hall, where they mostly got along with the other students.
Going to Rome in 1982, Prevost rounded out his formal education and expanded his view of the global church at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum. There, he was ordained as a priest, studied for a doctorate in the canon laws that govern the church, and moved for the first time into the Augustinian order’s house, playing tennis and table tennis, and participating in at least one peace march during the Cold War with Augustinians from around the world
When Francis was elected pope in 2013, Prevost told some of his fellow Augustinians, “Thank God, I’m never going to become bishop,” he recounted at an event years later, adding, “I’m not going to tell you the reason, but let’s just say that not all of my encounters with Cardinal Bergoglio ended in agreement.”
As a cardinal, he continued to live in an apartment near the Vatican by himself, forgoing the usual nuns who help. He shopped and cooked for himself, and lunched with the young priests, busing their plates. He got in the occasional match of tennis. “I play because it helps me,” he told Father Moral Antón, his successor as the head of the world’s Augustinians.