Dan Turley, O.S.A., was not among the people surprised that his friend and fellow Augustinian, Cardinal Robert Prevost, had been elected pope. “I was not totally shocked. I was sort of even expecting it, you could say.” He had snapped awake in the middle of the night at the time he believes the world’s cardinals had been electing his old friend to the highest office in the church.
“I asked myself, ‘I wonder if he has been chosen…’” He can’t help but chuckle as he shares the story.
“I know the new pope, Leo XIV, very well,” Bishop Turley says, speaking from Chicago where he has “retired” to work with Augustinian pre-novices and assist with the archdiocese’s confirmation program. “He’s just a wonderful person…. If you commission him in something, you delegate something to him, you know that it’s going to be done and that it’s going to be done well.”
“I know how well prepared he is for this most important mission as our pope,” Bishop Turley says. “With the grace of God, I’m sure he’s going to be a wonderful minister of our Lord as pope.”
Kevin Flaherty, S.J., served in Peru for 30 years and first met the man he knew as “Roberto” when then-Father Prevost was serving as the Augustinian formation director in Trujillo, Peru. “I could not believe it when I heard his name. I heard first, ‘Roberto’ and I thought, ‘My God, it can’t be; is it Prevost?’”
Father Flaherty, like hundreds of Vaticanistas, journalists and church analysts “had written him off,” presuming that as a North American, Cardinal Prevost had no chance of being elected. “I think it’s a real compliment that the cardinals don’t see him as an American, but as an international person who bridges two worlds.”
Father Flaherty points out that the pope’s most recent role as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops means that he has pored over reports from dioceses around the world, considering: “What are their needs; what are their challenges? Who are the potential leaders of the church?”
“He knows intimately the church and the world through the last two years,” Father Flaherty notes, augmenting the significant international experience Pope Leo had already acquired in two terms as Augustinian prior general.
Father Flaherty is finishing a sabbatical at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Tex., and preparing for a new assignment in campus ministry at Loyola University in Chicago. Father Flaherty describes Pope Leo XIV as a person of “deep spirituality, easy to be with,” armed with a dry and ready sense of humor.
“I’m still ecstatic…you feel the church so close,” he says. “All of a sudden somebody you know and you’ve worked with, and you’ve called each other by your first names, is standing on that balcony of St. Peter’s. It’s a great joy.”
Emergency call
Young Father Robert Prevost first arrived in Peru in 1985 during a time of crisis, the aftermath of devastating El Niño rains that had left thousands of people homeless. Assigned to Peru as an aide to the late Bishop John McNabb, O.S.A., his official work was set aside for a time, Bishop Turley recalls.
“He was doing everything he could to help because it was an emergency. People’s homes were knocked down. There was so much need—he got his hands dirty.” Father Prevost would unfortunately have to deal with El Niño events and the devastation that accompany them many times during his years in Peru.
In his first years in Peru, when not working in Augustinian formation, which included raising the money for a new seminary and supervising its construction, Father Prevost served as the administrator of two parishes.
Father Flaherty recalls Chulucanas, a large, rural diocese in the north of Peru near Ecuador, as “an area that is semiarid, almost the desert, and through irrigation, they have some agriculture, and then you go up into the foothills of the Andes and even beyond.” Father Prevost’s work brought him into regular contact with campesino and Indigenous communities of great poverty but also deep spirituality, according to Father Flaherty. “It’s an area where you really know the poor.”
“I think those were years that were formative in [developing] his pastoral style and understanding of how we work with the poor and his ability to be empathetic and listen,” he says.
“I really admired the Augustinians. They had a model of pastoral ministry right after Vatican II …that really sought to build a church of the people—so leadership, training, incorporation and a really good vision of the church.” He suggests that the Augustinian charism will surely influence the style and focus of the new pope.
Father Prevost served the Augustinian mission in Trujillo for 11 years during a period of great disorder in Peru, when guerrillas of El Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, a Maoist revolutionary movement, terrorized big cities and controlled entire territories in the Peruvian countryside.
‘Walking on needles’
The Shining Path was not as active in Trujillo, where Father Prevost served, as it was in other parts of Peru, Bishop Turley recalls, but certainly everyone was aware of its attacks and the threat it represented. “He certainly had to have the worries and the concerns because it was very dangerous,” Bishop Turley says. “We felt the presence of Sendero Luminoso throughout the country.”
In Chulucanas, Bishop Turley’s parish church was damaged and vandalized by a Shining Path column, and the mayor’s office was detonated by explosives. “We had a little library; it was all destroyed.”
At the same time, Bishop Turley remembers military units occupying church properties, and Peruvian soldiers, shockingly bereft of basic supplies themselves, raiding food supplies that had been set aside for the poor of the diocese and stealing animals from subsistence farmers. It was a very tense time, he says.
“We tried to manage that as best as we could, and it was not easy.”
“It was walking on needles.”
“You didn’t know sometimes who you were talking to…. People didn’t trust each other. They didn’t know who were informants for the government or informants for the Sendero Luminoso. So people were afraid to talk; people were afraid to express themselves.” The church found itself in a mediating role during the years of the Shining Path’s rampage, he remembers, serving the poor and the collateral victims of the violence, caught between the Peruvian military’s brutal efforts to suppress the Shining Path and the ruthless violence of the Maoist guerrillas. Bishop Turley agrees that experience could be part of the reason Cardinal Prevost elected to become another Leo, perhaps recalling Leo XIII’s efforts to position the church as a third way between the oppression of capitalists and the revolutionary impulses of European socialist factions.
Appointment to Chiclayo
For the next decade and half, the future Pope Leo XIV took on Augustinian leadership positions, first in the United States and then worldwide. But in November 2014, he returned to Peru, appointed by Pope Francis as the apostolic administrator of the Peruvian Diocese of Chiclayo. It was an experience he clearly remembers fondly, as he paused during his inaugural blessing to send a special greeting to “those of my dear diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru, where a faithful people has accompanied their bishop, has shared its faith and has given so, so much in order to keep being a church that is loyal to Jesus Christ.”
The appointment of Father Prevost as bishop of Chiclayo represented a tricky challenge, according to Father Flaherty, for a North American who would be perceived as a progressive—“not a plus for them”—and an outsider. The diocese had been under the direction of Opus Dei clerics for decades.
“It was almost like a conservative stronghold,” Father Flaherty remembers. “I think he won over the hearts of so many people in the Diocese of Chiclayo because he’s a man who, like Francis, would be out there, going to visit the rural communities, walking with the people, at the same time, trying to unify the diocese.”
Adding to the difficulties for the new bishop was the challenge of dealing with the abuse crisis in a part of the Catholic world that remained in denial about the problem. Though Pope Leo XIV has been criticized for his handling of accusations against a priest in Chiclayo, Bishop Turley believes he addressed the situation he discovered in the diocese as best he could under the ecclesial and civil constraints he faced in Peru.
“He was extremely concerned about caring for any person who would be the victim of any type of abuse,” Bishop Turley says.
Father Flaherty recalls the new bishop throwing himself into efforts to address the problem of clerical abuse and to create new procedures to combat it.
“He was very participative in the process of the church [in Peru] beginning to face the whole question of abuse and how do we change consciousness? [Because] it’s not just a matter of limits, which is so important, but also a whole change of consciousness of how people relate in the church and in society.”
Bishop Turley suggests another formative experience for the new pope has surely been the years in Chiclayo when he was called to respond to a vast migration emergency emerging out of the political and social disorder in Venezuela. According to the United Nations, Peru, with more than 1.5 million resident Venezuelans, hosts the highest number of Venezuelan refugees in the world and is the second-largest host country for forcibly displaced Venezuelans.
When the Venezuelan flight began in 2017, “it was a major, major crisis,” Bishop Turley remembers, “and we did everything we could to help them.” He believes that Pope Leo XIV managed one of the best national responses in Chiclayo, “being very organized and being very caring for the migrants.”
He is convinced that after that experience, care for migrating people will remain a primary focus of the new pope. “He is going to have the plight of the migrants in his heart, and he will do everything he can to help at every level that the church can,” the bishop says. “Following Pope Francis and following our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, he will be a defender of the migrants.”
A missionary church
Of the man he knew in Peru, Bishop Turley says, “He’s a born leader…. he knows how to delegate responsibilities to others. So that means he knows how to [share] responsibilities with others. And because he does that, he’s able to accomplish a lot.”
Bishop Turley describes the new pope as “very level, very stable,” explaining that when there is cause for joy, the pope will be “peacefully joyful”; when there is cause for concern or when a threat or a major problem presents itself, “he remains calm, at peace.”
In dealing with the Trump administration, Pope Leo XIV will not be confrontational, Bishop Turley says, but discreet—and at the same time firm in his insistence on the church’s teaching on human dignity.
“Everything that he did in Peru, all those experiences, they enrich him,” Bishop Turley says. “That experience is a blessing for him as the pontiff of our church. It means that he’s not a pope who was just in the classroom or in a study or writing letters.
“He was out there. He was very active pastorally, very concerned about the pastoral care of the people, of the migrants, of the poor.”
Like Bishop Prevost undoubtedly did, Father Flaherty has had the experience of visiting the kitchens of the poor of Peru to see tins of oil and other food assistance marked “U.S.A.I.D.” crowding the pantry. Now he regrets seeing his home country “rescinding” its commitment to the global poor through the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the U.S. Agency for International Development. He believes that decision and the needs of the global poor will surely be at front-of-mind for the new pope.
“I think [Pope Leo] would be very sensitive to how the U.S. is…not willing to share our wealth with the poor of the world,” Father Flaherty says. He notes that the pope, like many other members of the U.S. church, comes from immigrant stock. His family and missionary experience, he suggests, will compel his attention to immigration policy. And his experience dealing with the impact of mining in Peru will inform his thinking on ecology. Father Flaherty expects that in all these matters, Pope Leo will follow the path set by his predecessor.
“I don’t think he’s going to be the pope some North Americans would wish for,” Father Flaherty says. “I think he knows that.”
But referring to the pope’s experience in Chiclayo, Father Flaherty says, “He’s had the experience of going into work where it’s difficult and [had] to try to bring people together. I think he’s a unifier.”
All Catholics are on the same mission, Bishop Turley says, one that he believes Pope Leo will bring to the forefront. “Our church is missionary by its very essence. We were born out of the mission: ‘Go forth, teach and baptize the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’” he says.
“If we ever lose that, we would not be the church of Christ.” The missionary pope, he says, will restore that missionary spirit.
