Within minutes of his name being announced as Pope Leo XIV last Thursday there was a surge in Google searches asking: “who is Robert Prevost”?

This is not surprising. Until his name rang out from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Prevost had been a relative unknown on the world stage.

A cardinal only since 2023, he has given few media interviews and while originally from Chicago, Cardinal Prevost spent most of his career as a missionary in Peru and became a Peruvian citizen in 2015.

Commentators noted how Leo XIV chose to speak in Italian and Spanish, and not English in his first remarks as pontiff.

Fr Alejandro Moral, prior general of the Augustinian congregation, spoke to Patsy McGarry about his former boss, who is now his new boss.

Standing at the headquarters of the Augustinian congregation, next to St Peter’s Square in Rome, Fr Moral said that when his fellow Augustinian, Cardinal Robert Prevost, appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo XIV on Thursday night, his feelings were of “much emotion, love, a strong feeling of friendship, fraternity, and of course, joy”.

As prior general, his former boss had been “humble, he likes to listen, he lets everybody do their jobs; when he has a doubt, he asks,” Fr Moral said.

“They say he’s more Augustinian than American, because he didn’t live very much in the US and he’s from a family whose origins are in Spain, Italy and France. So he’s a man of the world, basically.”

Pope Leo XIV’s main concerns were for “justice, peace and getting people together – to build a bridge, as he mentioned from the balcony [on Thursday night].”

On the ordination of women to the priesthood and diaconate, Fr Moral said the new pope “needs time”.

Closer to home, Ireland’s best known Augustinian priest, Fr Iggy O’Donovan, knows the new pope quite well. In 1981 both were students of canon law in Rome.

Fr O’Donovan says Cardinal Prevost was “always Bob to me”.

Despite living and working for much of his career outside the US, the election of Cardina Prevost as the first US pope in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church has brought pride to Chicago’s southeast side, where he was born and raised.

The 267th occupant of the throne of St Peter was born in 1955 and grew up in Dolton, a historically working-class Catholic suburb.

Chicagoans celebrated the rise of one of their own to the papacy, including those in the city’s strong Irish-American Catholic community.

Paddy Homan, vice-president of philanthropy and community affairs at the Plymouth Place retirement community, suggested the 69-year-old’s time commitment to service is “symbolic” of the city. “Chicago is a city of big shoulders; they look out for one another.”

Cardinal Prevost’s older brother John Prevost always knew there was a chance his brother could be elected pope.

“Last Saturday when I was at church, one of the priests came over and told me the odds in Las Vegas were 18 to 1,” said John Prevost, who lives in suburban Chicago. “He didn’t have a doubt. He thought it would definitely be my brother.”

But Cardinal Prevost shrugged it off when his older brother called from Illinois.

“He said, ‘No way, not going to happen,’” recalled John Prevost (71) who is retired from a career as an educator and school principal.

Leo, whom Prevost is accustomed to calling Rob, “has great, great desire to help the downtrodden and the disenfranchised, the people who are ignored,” Prevost said. He predicted that his brother would carry on the legacy of his predecessor, Pope Francis.

“The best way I could describe him right now is that he will be following in Francis’s footsteps,” Prevost said. “They were very good friends.”

While the welcome for the new pope has been almost universal, as Patsy McGarry notes, Leo XIV’s strong social conscience is unlikely to go down well with JD Vance and Maga America, and in this context he notes the choice of papal name is highly significant.

The last Leo who was pope died in 1903, Leo XIII. This pope is remembered not for being the first pope to be filmed and to have his voice recorded.

Leo XIII is most remembered for the then radical encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 that addressed late 19th century issues of gross social inequality and social justice, focusing on the rights and duties of capital as well as labour. Subtitled On the conditions of Labour, it addressed in particular the relief of “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class”.

It supported the right to form unions, rejected socialism and unrestrained capitalism, while also affirming the right to private property.

Radical for its time, Rerum Novarum remains so today as does its argument that market forces must be tempered by moral considerations of the common good.

New Podcast: This week The Irish Times begins a new personal finance podcast called Better With Money. Hosted by Aideen Finnegan this podcast aims to inform people so that they can make better financial decisions. Each week Aideen will be joined by a different guest to discuss issues such as spending tracking to goal setting to switching providers.

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In the first episode Finnegan chats to Irish Times Consumer Affairs Correspondent Conor Pope about how to start saving. Better With Money is published each Tuesday and is available on irishtimes.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Five Key Reads

• Since the murder of Clodagh Hawe and her three sons Liam, Niall and Ryan by her husband Alan Hawe in 2016, Jacqueline Connolly has battled to uncover the full story behind their deaths. Her new memoir, Deadly Silence, traces the unimaginable tragedies in her life, the coercive control her sister suffered, and her determination to make the murders of her loved ones count for something. This weekend, she sat down with Nadine O’Regan to discuss.
• ‘It’s not the same place anymore’: Antisocial behaviour in a Dublin suburb: Earlier this week, Órla Ryan spoke to the residents of the Parkside estate who have reported a sharp increase in dangerous crime in recent months.
• ‘It was his first trip to Washington as Canada’s new prime minister and for Mark Carney, the task could not have been more straightforward: to go to the White House to explain to the United States president why his country is not for sale’: Keith Duggan wrote about Trump’s latest Oval Office blitz where new Canadian prime minister Mark Carney held his ground.
• At Dún Laoghaire’s Happy Out cafe it’s all about elevating expectations around young adults with Down syndrome – as well as good coffee, of course. Sylvia Thompson took a trip to see what it’s all about.
• Voicenotes from Gaza: Sally Hayden speaks to people in the Gaza Strip who detail the distressing realities of daily life which describe a people slowly starving, some resorting to crime in a bid to survive, and an unimaginable mental health crisis.

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