The ‘Least-American American’: How Bob Became Pope Leo XIV

No one expected an American to be elected pope in 2025. The conventional wisdom inside the Vatican was firm and long-standing: the United States already wielded too much geopolitical, economic, and military power for one of its citizens to also lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Yet as a new book excerpt published by NPR reveals, the cardinals who actually knew Cardinal Robert Prevost — the man his friends called “Bob” — had quietly concluded the opposite years before the rest of the world caught on.

The excerpt is drawn from American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City, a biography by NPR journalists Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow, due out Tuesday from Flatiron Books. It offers an intimate account of the 2025 conclave that elected the first American pontiff in the Church’s 2,000-year history — and of the paradox at its heart.

A Dark Horse With an American Problem

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope on May 8, 2025, on the fourth ballot of the conclave, taking the name Leo XIV. The conclave followed the death of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, and was the largest ever held, with 133 cardinal electors — 108 of them elevated by Francis himself. A two-thirds supermajority, roughly 89 votes, was required.

Despite his credentials, Prevost was widely viewed as a dark horse, and his nationality was seen as a serious obstacle. “We’re talking about a country that has political, economic, military power in the world,” Chicago’s archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, told the Chicago Sun-Times, “and so I think it’s a stretch to say that it’s prudent to go ahead and have someone who is from that country.”

Prevost, for his part, seemed unbothered. “Cupich said they aren’t going to elect an American,” he told his friend Father John Merkelis. “I’m sleeping well at night.” When Merkelis relayed the remark to their old mentor Sister Thérèse DelGenio, she responded with a one-word rebuke: “Oops. He forgot about the Holy Spirit.”

The political backdrop made an American pope seem even less likely. President Trump had returned to power and spent the early months of 2025 asserting his “America First” agenda. As cardinals gathered in Rome, Trump posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as the next pope — a move that offended cardinals and Catholics worldwide.

The Friends Who Saw It Coming

For Prevost’s circle of friends, the possibility had been obvious for months. In the days after Francis’s death, condolences poured into the cardinal’s phone — many carrying an unmistakable subtext.

John Barry, a high school friend, wrote to ask a pointed question. “I believe what Jeanette first said — that you could possibly be the next pope,” he wrote. “You’re the best man I know. And this may or may not be a silly question, but if you do become pope, can I still email you?”

Prevost’s reply was characteristically measured. “I just leave everything in the Lord’s hands,” he wrote, thanking Barry for his prayers. “Since I really don’t think there will be a need to change addresses, you can still write. … Just tell your dad that you call me by the right name!” The joke referred to a running family grievance: Barry’s father was forever annoyed that his son addressed a high-ranking cardinal as “Bob.”

A Conclave of Strangers and Allies

Among the cardinals arriving in Rome was New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, one of the few voting electors who had also participated in the 2013 conclave. Dolan, an ally of Trump who had prayed at both of the president’s inaugurations, prided himself on knowing most of his colleagues — yet he barely knew Prevost at all.

“I didn’t even think of him as an American,” Dolan recounted. “I had never met the man.” When other cardinals kept asking him about his fellow countryman, Dolan sought Prevost out. He noticed the quiet cardinal was not working the room. “It wasn’t aloofness,” Dolan said. “I thought it might just be shyness.”

The General Congregation meetings that preceded the conclave were, by Cardinal Joseph Tobin’s account, chaotic: “They said it was kind of like listening to an argument in an Italian barbershop while watching an episode of The Sopranos.” But a consensus gradually formed around the kind of leader the cardinals wanted. Dolan summed it up: “Non-flashy. Reliable. Not impetuous, not unscripted. … Just sort of measured, circumspect. Calm. There’s not going to be any bombshells.”

That description fit Prevost precisely. He was a close ally of Francis committed to synodality, immigrant advocacy, and environmentalism. And crucially, he had spent decades in Peru — serving as a missionary from 1985 and later as Bishop of Chiclayo — becoming a Peruvian citizen in 2015. “The least-American American” became a phrase attributed to various cardinals, capturing why his nationality might not disqualify him after all.

Peruvian Cardinal Pedro Barreto, too old to vote, mentally ticked through the cardinals’ priorities as he listened. Prevost had addressed abuse as head of the Peruvian bishops’ council. He had worked on church finances. He had been in Rome just two years — enough to learn the ropes, not enough to become entrenched. “Check, check, check, check, check,” Barreto said to himself.

Roots in Peru and the South Side

Prevost’s biography, as documented by Aid to the Church in Need, explains much of his appeal. Born September 14, 1955, in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and raised in the suburb of Dolton, he entered the Order of Saint Augustine in 1977 and was ordained in Rome in 1982. In Peru, he served in the northern diocese of Chulucanas and then in Trujillo during the violent years of the Shining Path insurgency.

Fr. John J. Lydon, a fellow Augustinian missionary, recalled that Prevost was “very attentive to making sure the poor were treated with dignity, which in those days wasn’t the norm.” When the Midwest Augustinians urged missionaries to adopt an evacuation plan, Prevost and his colleagues chose instead to “make a plan about how to accompany the people in this time of the Cross, not to leave and look like we’re abandoning them.” The order opened soup kitchens for internally displaced people that still serve the poor today.

Lydon believes the choice of the papal name was deliberate. “I would say that he took the name Leo because Leo XIII was the pope who gave the first document of Catholic social teaching on workers’ rights and human dignity,” he said.

A Quiet Acceptance

In the final days before the conclave, Prevost gave himself over to whatever might come. “I took a deep breath,” he later said. “I said, ‘Here we go, Lord. You’re in charge. You lead the way.’”

His brother John, praying in New Lenox, Illinois, had resisted the idea at first. “I didn’t want him to become pope, either,” John recalled — it would mean an end to his brother’s visits home. But his prayers shifted: “Not my will, but, what’s good for the church.”

On May 8, 2025, the cardinals elected the man from the South Side. As Wikipedia notes, he became the first American pope, the first from the Order of Saint Augustine, and the first to hold Peruvian citizenship.

Analysis: Why the Impossible Became Inevitable

Prevost’s election is best understood as the convergence of two forces. The first was continuity: Francis had appointed the overwhelming majority of the electors, and Prevost embodied the late pope’s priorities without the polarizing intensity that had come to define his predecessor’s tenure. The second was a yearning for calm. A significant bloc — including figures like Dolan, who had been close to Trump — wanted a leader who would not generate controversy. Prevost’s apparent shyness, once a liability in a church that rewards charisma, became an asset.

His American identity, meanwhile, was neutralized by his biography. Having spent more of his adult life in Peru than in the United States, he could plausibly be framed as a Latin American pastor who happened to carry a U.S. passport. The “least-American American” was, in the end, American enough for the cardinals who knew him and not American enough to alarm those who feared Washington’s influence.

Kirkus Reviews called the Burke and Detrow biography “a welcome, revealing life of the first North American bishop of Rome,” praising the authors’ attention to the politics of the Church. The book’s release arrives as Leo XIV’s young papacy has already confronted major tests, including his opposition to armed conflict and nationalism, his advocacy for immigrant rights, and the 2026 schism with the Society of St. Pius X.

What’s Next

American Pope reaches shelves on Oct. 6, 2026, offering the fullest inside account yet of how the conclave of 2025 defied a centuries-old taboo. For the cardinals who called him Bob, the surprise was never his election — only that the rest of the world had failed to see what they had known all along.

As Prevost’s own friends might put it, the Holy Spirit, as ever, had the last word.