ROME — Three hours after Pope Leo XIV was elected the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, friend Lisa Solava emailed him from her home in southwest suburban New Lenox, where she and her husband, Rich, were panic packing for a flight to Rome the next morning.
“We’re arriving Friday, but I guess we can’t have you out for pizza, huh?” she wrote.
The new pope, her friend of more than 20 years whom she still thinks of as “Father Bob,” quickly responded: “No, but maybe you could come in.”
Still answering his own emails. A good sign, Solava thought.
Maybe some things will stay the same even if everything has changed in the most extraordinary of ways.
“He said yes to the dress, it’s his uniform now,” she said, smiling, during an interview with the Sun-Times on Tuesday at an outdoor café in Rome’s Piazza Navona, where she and her husband were joined by Denise Utter to share stories about their longtime mutual friend, Robert Prevost, as he rose to the papacy.
Rich Solava’s voice quavered as he spoke about the weight of responsibility his friend now shoulders. Tears welled in his eyes as he considered the pressure the new pontiff will endure for the rest of his life, and how his friends will need to let go of him a bit so that the pope can befriend the rest of the world.
But not before there was one more night together with pizza and selfies.
20-year friendship
The Solavas and Utter first met the Rev. Robert Francis Prevost, aka “Father Bob,” when he was the prior general of his religious order, the Augustinians, and would stop to visit with their then-pastor, the Rev. Michael Schweifle of St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox. Prevost and Schweifle were classmates at Villanova University.
On Easter Sunday 2005, Schweifle underwent a heart transplant at Loyola University Medical Center. His recovery was lengthy, and Lisa Solava became one of his main volunteer caregivers. When Prevost came through town, often on layovers from one of his many trips around the world visiting Augustinian missionaries, he would stop to see Schweifle, and eventually befriended a number of St. Jude parishioners, including the Solavas, Utter and her husband, Rob.
After Schweifle passed away in 2009, they all stayed in touch. Both couples eventually became Augustinian “affiliates” — lay people who support the order in various ways and are officially recognized as part of the “Augustinian family.”
In 2011, the two couples traveled to Rome, where Prevost was living at the time. He picked them up from the airport in a tiny Italian car stuffed with their luggage, put them up at the Augustinian house in Vatican City and showed them the sites, including a private tour of the Sistine Chapel and the Room of Tears — a small antechamber off the Sistine chapel where the newly elected pope changes into his papal vestments for the first time.
When Prevost’s tenure as prior general ended in 2013, he returned to Chicago for what turned out to be not as long as everyone expected. In 2014, he received a call from the papal nuncio as he was driving back from Wisconsin, Utter and the Solavas recalled him telling them over an Italian dinner at one of their favorite haunts, Gattos in New Lenox.
“Are you sitting down,” the nuncio asked.
“Well, yes, I’m driving,” Prevost said.
“Pull over,” the nuncio said. He had news. Pope Francis was going to make Prevost a bishop in Peru. It was unexpected.
But, Prevost told his friends, “You have to trust and say yes to the call.”
“That’s when we really started to get to know his trust in saying yes to the call and to the Holy Spirit, wherever it was going to take him,” Utter said.
‘A great sense of humor’
In 2015, his fellow Augustinians held a party in Chicago to celebrate his being made a bishop. The festivities happened to fall on Lisa Solava’s 50th birthday. Prevost kidded with her at the gathering, “Do you like the party I threw for you?”
“He’s got a great sense of humor,” said Lisa Solava, now 60, who works in corporate HR. “And the best laugh,” her husband added.
Before he left for Rome to attend what his friends called “baby bishop school” — training sessions held at the Vatican for newly-ordained bishops — he indulged Lisa in taking a selfie with her (he’s not a fan, generally).
Then Lisa told him the only birthday present she wanted from him was a selfie with Pope Francis.
A few days later, in the wee hours of the morning in New Lenox, her phone chimed. It was a text message from Prevost with a photo attached: A selfie with Pope Francis, as requested.
The friend group continued to visit in person when they could. Most recently, then-Cardinal Prevost visited New Lenox in August 2024. The Solavas hosted and served pizza. (Not from Aurelios.)
Over pizza that summer evening, Prevost talked about how popes are chosen, Utter and the Solavas recalled.
“He said everybody wants a Holy Father that fits into this goal and he said, ‘Francis is the Holy Father that we needed. Benedict was the Holy Father that we needed then, John Paul II was the one we needed prior to that, and so on and so on,” Lisa Solava said.
“There was no sense that it would ever be him,” Utter added. “But he said, ‘Don’t lose faith. The Holy Spirit is always with us. And … the Holy Spirit brought us this pope.’”
After Pope Francis’ death, Prevost’s name began surfacing in the lists of “papabile” (or potential candidates to be the next pope). Concerned for her friend, Lisa Solava sent him an email on April 27 to say she and many other friends were praying for him.
“We can’t even begin to imagine what this whirlwind must be like for you right now. … We all have mixed feelings for you. On one hand, we won’t be disappointed if you don’t end up walking out on the balcony, purely for selfish reasons of wanting to keep our friends somewhat accessible. But on the other hand, we would be absolutely overjoyed if that turns out to be God’s will for you. Your wisdom and compassion would bring so much to the world.”
A few hours later, Prevost responded, saying, in part:
“Thanks for the message. I sleep well at night (so far) trusting in the belief that there will not be an American pope.”
Utter sent him a similar email before bed one night as the conclave was about to begin, expressing sympathy for the loss of Prevost’s friend, Pope Francis, and offering him her prayers.
When she awoke the next morning, Prevost had responded, saying in part: “Pray for whoever’s going to be elected to this. They need our prayers. … Trust in the Spirit.”
“He said, ‘they.’ It was never him,” she said.
A little more than a week later, on the evening of May 8 in Rome, Father Bob became Pope Leo XIV, pontifex maximus, the bishop of Rome, successor to St. Peter, the first pope from the United States, the first from North America, and popularly known as the “first American pope” — even if he is the “least American of the Americans,” according to his friends.
When the white smoke appeared from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, Utter, 60, a writer and ministry coach who works with Catholic and Protestant clergy and congregations, was in St. Peter’s Square, where she’d been keeping watch for two days. When his name was announced and he walked out on the central loggia, she let out a scream that she said was almost primal. The next few hours were a blur of joyful disbelief as thousands of strangers celebrated “Papa Leone.”
“They don’t even know him, and they love him!” she said.
Lisa and Rich Solava were at home in front of the TV in New Lenox. All three friends had made plans to be in Rome the week of the conclave, even if they weren’t sure why at the time. They just had a feeling, they said.
Not long after the Solavas arrived in Rome and met up with Utter, the friends received text messages from their St. Jude pastor, the Rev. Raymond Flores, who was accompanied by another parishioner — the pope’s brother, John Prevost: Leo would like to have dinner with them at his apartment near St. Monica’s Church, his titular parish in Rome around the corner from St. Peter’s Basilica.
“The Holy Father is inviting us to his place. So, let’s meet at St. Monica’s at 4:45 … then we can go to dinner. Will that work?”
“Will that work?? Are you kidding? You name it and we’ll be there,” they responded.
When they got to the flat that belonged to Cardinal Prevost before he was Pope Leo (reportedly he will move into the papal palace some time after his installation on Sunday), “Nobody wanted to walk in first,” Lisa Solava recalled. “But I’m not shy. I walked in and he was talking to his personal secretary, Eduardo, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t be there , but then I saw [the pope] and said (jokingly) “Maybe I shouldn’t come in, this looks private.”
“And he said, ‘Get in here.’”
When the four friends were reunited, there were hugs. Lots of them. “Bear hugs.”
For the better part of an hour, “we just hung out,” Utter said. “We talked and shared things we were seeing and hearing. We had a lot to get in in just a short time.”
Now the pope, but still ‘Father Bob’
As for their friend, the outfit had changed — the pope wears his white papal vestments in all but the most private occasions, “any time anybody sees me,” he told them — but the man wearing it had not.
“He was still very serene … comfortable in his own skin,” Rich Solava, 70, said.
“He was still Father Bob, but you could see he had started to transform,” Utter said. “He put it on, but he wore it well.”
They joked with the pope about coming to visit them again in Chicago.
“I said, ‘You probably can’t come to my house for pizza without all your security,’” Lisa Solava said. “He goes, ‘I have to have security.’ I go, I mean, if you wanted to bring the Swiss guard and have them out in the front lawn…’
“He says, ‘Your neighbors might wonder.’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I think we have to come back here,’ meaning the Vatican. I said, ‘That sounds like an invitation and we’ll see you soon.’”
When it came time to go, Pope Leo asked his friends if they’d like a photo — something they hadn’t even thought about as they were catching up.
“He goes, ‘Do you guys wanna do a picture?’” Lisa Solava recalled. “And I go, yeah. He goes, ‘A selfie, right?’”
Cathleen Falsani wrote about the installation of Pope Benedict XVI as the Sun-Times religion reporter and columnist from 2000-2010. She is at the Vatican to cover the installation of Pope Leo XIV for Chicago Public Media.