Pope Leo XIV liked to play priest as a child, brother says

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, The New York Times reported.

“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.”