As a boy growing up in a suburb of Chicago, the future Pope Leo XIV did not pretend to be a cowboy or a bank robber. Instead, he liked to play priest, according to his eldest brother, Louis Prevost.
“We teased him a lot about, ‘Na na na, you’re gonna be the pope,’” Mr. Prevost, 73, recalled in an interview on Friday at his home in Port Charlotte, Fla.
But it came as a bit of a shock when Robert Francis Prevost — Rob to his family — was in fact elected to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.
“My brother’s the pope,” Mr. Prevost, 73, said, sitting on his porch. “Yikes.”
The three Prevost brothers — Louis, Rob and John — grew up in Dolton, Ill., just south of Chicago, and attended church and school at St. Mary of the Assumption on Chicago’s South Side. Their father, also named Louis, was a school superintendent and their mother, Mildred Prevost, was a librarian.
The future pope was always a peacemaker, Mr. Prevost recalled, even though the siblings could be a bit rough-and-tumble in their youth. “Jeez, it was like just yesterday, I was throwing him down the stairs,” Mr. Prevost said. “And now he’s pope!”
Mr. Prevost, who has been living on the Gulf Coast of Florida since 2020, said that he could only guess at what kind of pontiff his brother would be. “I think he’s going to be similar to Francis, but maybe not quite as liberal-minded, you know, flexing the church rules quite so much,” he said. “I think he’d be a little more conservative.”
Mr. Prevost described himself as a conservative and a Catholic, adding that he and his brother disagreed on some things. For one, they had different ideas about conflict and war. Mr. Prevost, who was serving in the Navy when the future pope was ordained as a priest in Rome in 1982, said that he was not as pacifistic as his brother.
“You come at me, guess what? You’re going to feel the wrath,” he said. “I’m of that mind-set. Rob, not so much.”
Mr. Prevost — who enjoys line dancing and, based on his cellphone ringtone, the band Led Zeppelin — said that he had spoken to his brother by phone early this week, shortly before the conclave began. Now, he wonders when, or whether, he will talk to him again. “I don’t know that you can just pick up the phone and call the pope,” Mr. Prevost said. “It’s like calling the president or something.”
He added, “I don’t expect we’ll see the Popemobile pulling up outside.”
But he feels certain that Pope Leo belongs at the Vatican. “He’ll do a bang-up job,” he said.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for the National desk of The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics all across the country.
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