VATICAN CITY — When Sister Barbara Reid is asked to describe her friend Bob Prevost — the man the world has been getting to know this week by a new name, Pope Leo XIV — many words come easily to mind.
Holy. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Wise.
All qualities one might expect or at least hope for in the most recognizable Christian on the planet.
But there’s more.
“He’s a person who immediately exudes kindness,” Reid, the president of Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, where Pope Leo earned his Master of Divinity degree in 1982, told the Sun-Times on Saturday as she escaped the blazing Roman sun in a shady corner of the Augustinian General Curia — the Vatican headquarters of the new pope’s religious order.
“He is very present to you, deeply pastoral … discerning, and trustworthy. You know that anything you say to him will be kept,” she said. “He is someone who also has a global vision and a deep sensitivity for people who are the most suffering, the people who are most on the fringes, the poorest of the poor.”
The picture Reid, a religious sister from the Dominican order and a leading scholar in the feminist interpretation of scripture, paints of Pope Leo bears a striking resemblance to the late Pope Francis who was a close mentor to Chicago’s home-grown pope, the first pontiff from North America in the church’s 2,000-year history.
Pope Leo is “a very similar kind of person,” said Reid, who met him shortly after she arrived at CTU in 1988 while he was serving as vocational director for the Augustinians in Chicago. “I think he might be a little less outgoing than Pope Francis, a little more reserved.”
Other friends have described Leo as almost preternaturally calm, centered, grounded, at ease in his own skin. He’s peaceful, they say, and he’s a peacemaker.
Reid concurs.
“He definitely exudes that,” she said. “That’s so desperately needed in our world. … He’s already demonstrated that he can and does build bridges all the time. And he’s a healing, reconciling kind of a person. I’m so hoping that he will bring more healing and unity to our broken world.”
Reid had hoped Prevost might join the CTU faculty as a professor of canon law (he holds a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome) when he completed his tenure as prior general of the Augustinian order in 2013. But Pope Francis had other ideas, returning Prevost to Peru, where he soon became Bishop of Chiclayo.
The Rev. John Lydon first met Prevost when they were both undergraduate students at Villanova University in the ‘70s. Prevost was a seminarian and Lydon, who hails from Toronto, was a “regular” university student. They bonded over their commitment to the nascent “pro-life” movement that emerged after the Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion in 1973. “We were in the founding group of Villanovans for Life,” said Lydon, who is also 69.
They headed to different cities for graduate school — Prevost to Chicago and Lydon, who had discerned a call to ministry during his junior year at Villanova and decided to join the Augustinians, to Washington — but eventually wound up living together for a decade in the same house in Peru.
Making pizza in Peru
The Bob he knew as a college kid is very much the same person the world now calls Pope Leo, Lydon said.
“He was always personable, easy to talk to in college and that was my experience living with him,” Lydon, who flew from Chicago (where he is the formation director for the Augustinians) to Rome on Saturday and plans to be a concelebrant of the special Mass on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square, where his friend will be formally installed as the 267th successor of St. Peter.
“Living in community, some people are easy to live with, some people not. He was very easy to live with, very concerned about the common good,” Lydon said. “He would cook pizza for us — in the ’90s in Peru you couldn’t get pizza. It was a very difficult time because of terrorism and dictatorship after that.”
Prevost, he said, “was a very down-to-earth person. That’s his personality. That’s probably how he will continue to be as pope.”
It’s difficult to choose one thing that stands out from a long friendship, but Lydon knows what has left the most enduring impression on him about Leo: “The way he treated the poor.”
In Peru “our parish was at the very southern end of Trujillo … and it was a very poor parish because about half of it was people that came from the mountain areas trying to escape terrorism. They left and they had nothing, you know? They were trying to rebuild a life. So, we began soup kitchens there and which still function in that part of the parish 30 years later.”
Prevost’s efforts went beyond trying to meet the physical needs of his poor parishioners and neighbors. He was determined to create what Pope Francis called the “synodal church,” where everyone — priest and lay people, young and old — participates in and is responsible for the life of the church, Lydon explained.
“It’s a question of presence more than anything — just being with them,” he said. “That’s the Peruvian feel. It’s a sign of respect if you are present with them. The gift of presence.”
In late-1980s Peru, “the poor were always poorly treated by the authorities. The people found in [Prevost] a different model of how they were treated with dignity. And they really loved him,” Lydon said, so much so that they had to block out a whole week in September to celebrate his birthday because every part of the parish wanted to honor him with a party.
The Master of Divinity degree Leo earned from CTU was his first theological degree and perhaps the most foundational for his life in ministry. CTU was founded in 1968 in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which urged the Catholic Church to “read the signs of the times,” Reid explained.
“One of the slogans we had for some time was that CTU was ‘bold and beautiful,’” she said. “Bob Prevost would have been grounded in faithfulness to the tradition, but boldness in bridging the present into the future in how that takes expression.”
Prevost’s spiritual director was authority on women in the church
As a student at CTU, the future pope would have had classmates who were Christians but not Catholic, been exposed to the union’s celebrated Catholic-Jewish Studies Program, and even had the opportunity to study with Rabbi Hayim Perlemuter, who taught Jewish Studies from 1969 to 2000.
“Another thing that still today sets CTU apart is that from early on, women were in class right alongside the [male] seminarians,” Reid said. So, [Pope Leo] would have studied right alongside women who were also doing the same degree that he was doing, and he would have had women professors.”
In fact, when Pope Leo was a student at CTU, his spiritual director — in the Catholic tradition, a person who is specially trained to accompany others on their spiritual journeys and in deepening a relationship with God — was a woman: Sister Lyn Osiek.
A religious sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Osiek was a professor of New Testament at CTU for 26 years and is a leading authority on the role of women in the early church.
“For a seminarian to have a woman as spiritual director would be unheard of in other kinds of seminaries,” Reid said. “So, he would have been formed in such a way that he’d be very comfortable with women in ministry alongside him. And that’s not so of all Roman Catholic seminaries and schools of theology.”
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.
