Pope Leo XIV: The First American Pontiff In History

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Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States was revealed Thursday as the next pope, taking the name Pope Leo XIV.

The Conclave announced the selection of Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost as the 267th Bishop of Rome in a statement shared on the Vatican News website on Thursday, May 8. Prevost was born in Chicago, Illinois, In 1955, and is the first Pope to hail from the U.S., and only the second to come from the Americas, following the late Pope Francis. (RELATED: Remembering His Holiness Pope Francis, Servant Of The Servants Of God)

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From Vatican News:

[Prevost] spent his childhood and adolescence with his family and studied first at the Minor Seminary of the Augustinian Fathers and then at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, where in 1977 he earned a Degree in Mathematics and also studied Philosophy. 

On September 1 of the same year, he entered the novitiate of the Order of Saint Augustine (O.S.A.) in Saint Louis, in the Province of Our Lady of Good Counsel of Chicago, and made his first profession on September 2, 1978. On August 29, 1981, he made his solemn vows.

He received his theological education at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. At the age of 27, he was sent by his superiors to Rome to study Canon Law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). 

Reactions To Pope XIV

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“He’s somebody that, even though he’s from the West, would be very attentive to the needs of a global church,” CNN’s Vatican Analyst Elise Allen noted. “You’re talking about somebody who spent over half of his ecclesial career abroad as a missionary in Peru.”

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