Steeled and centered by a year of prayer and retreat from the world, Brother Robert Prevost prepared to move back to his hometown of Chicago. His next goal on the path to full priesthood was earning a master of divinity degree in his father’s childhood neighborhood, Hyde Park.
Catholic Theological Union was a hotbed of post-Vatican II experimentation when Prevost arrived in the fall of 1978. Among many other changes, the Second Vatican Council had modernized the way priests were trained and educated. The theological model of the church previously had been memorization, not innovation. But now there was a chance to shift and decentralize that process, leaving the details up to individual orders and dioceses, emphasizing the importance of real-world ministry training.
Sensing an opportunity, American leaders of three religious orders—the Passionists, the Servites and the Franciscans—decided to act, pooling their resources to create a new theological school of their own in the heart of an urban community. They settled on Hyde Park, a Chicago neighborhood near the University of Chicago’s Divinity School and a handful of other thriving Protestant seminaries. They purchased an old hotel a few blocks from Lake Michigan, called the Aragon, to house the school and began the process of closing down and selling off their old individual seminaries. The doors of Catholic Theological Union opened in the turbulent year of 1968. (One of the first faculty planning meetings was held the morning after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.) As the school grew, more religious orders, including the Augustinians, began sending their seminarians there.
A decade later, the 229 students enrolled at the school—including Prevost and Robert Dodaro, a fellow Augustinian and friend of Prevost since their high-school-seminary days, and the other newly professed Augustinians from their novice class—were the picture of progressive Catholicism. The student body was made up not only of priests-in-training but laypeople as well; it was a mix of men and women, Americans and international students. Everyone, faculty members included, called each other by their first names. No one wore Roman collars or habits on campus.
Each day, they would crowd into classrooms, or down the street in spaces rented from a synagogue, and amid clouds of cigarette smoke—one student with allergies wrote about having to sit on the floor to avoid the plumes—dig into their coursework. They studied the New and Old Testaments, feminist theology and a relatively new school of thinking coming out of South America called liberation theology, which emphasized Jesus’ commitment to the poor. They learned how to preach and delivered weekly homilies to their classmates that would be recorded, analyzed and critiqued.
But it wasn’t enough, according to C.T.U. thinking, to learn about theology in textbooks and in classrooms. Students had to learn how to put that learning into practice. Every new scholar was required to spend a set number of hours each week working in parishes, schools or hospitals. That work was just as important, if not more so, than whatever they would learn from books.
Father John Szura, the Augustinian friar who headed C.T.U.’s master of divinity program, was particularly committed to that part of the school’s mission. In the fall of 1978 he was looking to place some of his charges—Prevost among them—in ministry fieldwork locations for the coming school year. He had heard good things from a young Augustinian about a new program started by a nun in his home parish who might need more assistance. One day, Szura reached out. With her permission, he explained, he wanted to send two first-year students her way that fall.
Rebirth at St. Victor
If there was one parish that best exemplified the open, experimental and passionate American church in the first decade after Vatican II, it was St. Victor, a working-class Polish parish in Calumet City, Ill., near the Indiana border. For years, the congregation had been dying a slow death. But the 1975 arrival of Father Leo Mahon, a stocky and animated Irish American priest who had spent the previous decade helping run a Chicago Archdiocese mission in Panama, had revived and re-energized the community. After one of his first Masses, Mahon organized a meet-and-greet coffee for parishioners. He delivered a brief speech about his intentions: “A lot of things have happened in the church over the last several years,” he said, “that we all agree have not taken place here at St. Victor. So, there are some things we are going to immediately implement.”
For instance, starting then and there, both men and women would be allowed to serve as lectors (reading the Scriptures and prayers) and help distribute Holy Communion as Eucharistic ministers. Knowing the latter decision, especially, might make some of the older, more traditionalist parishioners bristle, Mahon picked two longtime members of the church, one male and one female, as his first two Eucharistic ministers. The gambit worked: An older conservative woman, one who had vowed never, ever to receive Communion from someone who wasn’t a priest, soon found herself in the church aisle, approaching her longtime friend and peer, a woman named Fanny. She paused, took a deep breath, said to herself, “Oh, what the hell,” and walked up to receive the body of Christ.
“You know what?” she told a priest after the Mass. “I feel young again.”
In short order, Mahon also banished the type of scolding and judgment that priests like those at Prevost’s childhood parish, St. Mary’s, had once directed at parishioners. If the flock was to grow and thrive, the church had to be accepting. “Yes, I agree that once again we ‘regulars’ will be tempted to complain about the ‘Christmas Catholics,’ to resent losing our seats to people we rarely see otherwise,” he wrote one holiday season in a parish dispatch. “I beg you, however, in the name of the Lord to be hospitable to all our brothers and sisters for that is what they are. Instead of complaining, let us rejoice they have come ‘home.’”
The adjustments made an impact. Before long, St. Victor was humming again with members and daily activities. Two different church choirs, one traditional, one folk. Cub Scout meetings. Cheerleading practice. A ceramics club. To expand access, Mahon turned the parish’s convent into a retreat center and began hosting regular meetings for all sorts of support groups: Overeaters Anonymous, events called “divorce rap sessions,” gatherings of families struggling with children with drug or behavior problems. He also launched what he called a college of ministry, where parishioners could take weekly courses on theology.
The overall goal, said Father Bill Stenzel, a freshly ordained priest who served as Mahon’s right-hand man, was to get away from the idea of the church as “Catholic Marshall Field’s” (a reference to the now defunct Chicago department store), where you strolled around and selected necessary sacraments. “Fall in love? Go to the marriage department,” he explained in the analogy. “Have a baby? Go to the baptism department. Have a kid in school? Go to the Communion department. That kind of thing, without anything that wove it together.” Instead, St. Victor would offer the church as a community hub and space for people to gravitate toward in all moments of life, not just the religious ones.
Helping Families Confront Alcoholism
One piece of this growth was of special importance to Mahon: the parish’s alcoholism outreach team. Drinking had always been a problem in the community, where each ethnic enclave boasted corner bars filled with men coming off long, grueling shifts at the nearby steel mills and other industrial jobs. Lately, those same mills had begun to lay people off, making the problem worse. The priest knew the struggles these men and their families faced—his own brother had recently died after a painful struggle with alcoholism.
Hoping to formalize a program to help, he called Sister Thérèse DelGenio, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur who had taught at the parish school and had overseen a homeless shelter and addiction program in Indiana. Like Mahon, DelGenio knew alcoholism firsthand: she had dedicated her life to working with addicts after growing up with a mother who suffered from the disease. Determined to help the growing numbers of people struggling with substance abuse in and around St. Victor, she and Stenzel got to work recruiting a team of about a dozen parishioners. (As it turned out, Stenzel was adept at identifying promising candidates: A few years later, when he was assigned to another parish, he would work closely with a young organizer named Barack Obama.) Together, they immersed themselves in the latest literature about addiction treatment. They found themselves drawn to an emerging approach: intervening with alcoholics and their families before they hit absolute rock bottom, so they could enter treatment before causing even more damage to themselves and their families.
Getting the program off the ground called for delicate but intense action. First, they placed every member of the outreach team’s phone numbers in the parish bulletin, hoping that those looking for help would find them. Before they knew it, they were fielding frequent calls from wives or children of addicts, often at the end of their emotional rope. Two members of the team would meet with the caller and then their whole family, minus the addict, to talk about what recovery and rehabilitation would look like. They would begin to plan an intervention—an emotional and uncomfortable meeting where each family member, one by one, would tell their loved one just how much his or her addiction was harming them. If all went as planned, they would take the addict to a rehabilitation program to begin treatment, directly from the meeting.
In the fall of 1978, about a year into the effort, DelGenio got the call from Szura looking to place two of his new C.T.U. students in her program. She agreed. Not long after, she found herself outside the convent, now branded Jubilee House, waiting to greet the two newly professed Augustinian brothers Szura had sent her way. As they approached, she took them in. One was short and seemingly intense, with dark curly hair and a newly grown mustache. The other young man had an animated smile, a long face and thick, wavy hair.
“I’m Bob,” said Prevost.
“I’m Bob,” Dodaro added.
The two Bobs seemed proud of their little schtick. DelGenio wasn’t impressed.
“Be more creative. Really,” she replied.
At first, Prevost and Dodaro watched and learned. Once a week, on Wednesday evenings, the team would gather on the first floor for training sessions and debriefs about prior outreaches and interventions. Each meeting would begin with a prayer and end with a meal or a snack. Sometimes their serious conversations about the best way to help suffering families would be interrupted by laughter trickling down from another group meeting on the floor above them.
Once they had a handle on the process, the Bobs began observing family meetings and intervention planning sessions and then attending the interventions themselves, taking more of an active role over time. During those early stages, Prevost made an impression on DelGenio. “He had a great way of just kind of getting in the middle,” she later recalled, “and making both sides come together and build bridges.” A good observer and a good listener, she noted—both helpful traits in this line of work.
The Bobs spent Wednesdays and Thursdays with DelGenio and her team. She became their guide through the world of addiction and their mentor in ministry. “I dragged them all over the city of Chicago,” she remembered. “They had to learn all the symptoms of the progression of the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. They had to know how all of that impacted the family—the hurt it caused.”
She took them to the hospitals and rehab programs where the team sought to place addicts and taught them to ask detailed but careful questions about how the disease had affected people’s lives. An innocent-sounding question like “How are you sleeping?” she warned, could be quite triggering to a worried family member: “They’re either oversleeping because they don’t want to get up and face this, or they’re not sleeping at all because they’re looking out the window waiting for the car to come home to see what kind of shape [their family member] is in,” she’d explain. They had to anticipate the cause and effect of each stage of the process—of every word they said—with compassion, honesty and, above everything else, a careful, deliberate thoughtfulness.
A Time for Understanding
An understanding of personalities, behavior and interpersonal dynamics was also critical. The person who would seek out a meeting was always eager to confront their family member’s addiction right away, but the team would slow things down. More often than not, that person was the member of the family who took the lead on every other crisis or issue; the counselors didn’t want to give them too much power, or create conditions where their family ignored their suggestion. Months would often go by between that initial conversation and any intervention, and details about rehab or more significant steps were often purposely held back until a second (or third, or fourth) session, when the full group was better prepared to deal with the realities and consequences of the decision.
The outreach team also insisted that all family members begin attending Al-Anon, the support group for family members of addicts, before any firm steps could be taken. Multiple dress rehearsals took place before interventions, during which family members would write out their statements and read them over and over again. Stenzel would often ask them about the addict’s religious views to determine whether or not he would dress in his clerical garb (“use his collar power,” as he put it) during the real thing.
Once an intervention was set, there was a strict format to follow: Each testimony would begin with an “honest and caring statement,” but not a sugarcoated one. The family members would express their love, but also their serious concerns and strains. Then they would tell the addict, in detail, what happened when they drank and how it affected them. The more specific, the team advised, the better. Statements like “Last Tuesday, you…” were encouraged over more general framing like “You always….” As this all played out, one facilitator would lead the conversation, while another would scan the moods and body language of everyone in the room, in order to adapt next steps as needed. If all went well, the night would end with a drive to a hospital or rehab center, where the addict would immediately enter treatment.
What was perhaps most interesting about the whole process was what was not included in the interventions. While the St. Victor staff talked about faith and prayed with each other, they never did so during the interventions themselves.
“They don’t need to hear about God,” DelGenio explained. “They’re very mad at God. Very, very mad at God. Especially the person who’s the addict. I mean, they prayed foxhole prayers to stop, and they didn’t get any help—so who the heck are you, God?”
“This is not the time to talk about God,” she reiterated. “This is the time to act like God. To be loving and understanding.”
It was intense and exhausting work, and the team would unwind after interventions with a trip to the 24-hour Greek diner across the street from St. Victor and talk through what had happened, what had worked, what hadn’t and how they felt. This, Prevost learned that year, was just as much what being a priest was about as saying Mass and administering Communion. Helping the desperate and down-and-out in the middle of the night. Facing head-on, and trying as best as he could to confront the darker and messier aspects of the human condition.
This article was excerpted from American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City by Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow. Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
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