NPR's Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow covered the 2025 conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV. The following excerpt is adapted from their new biography of Pope Leo, American Pope, out Tuesday.
In the days immediately following Pope Francis' death, messages from friends poured into Cardinal Robert Prevost's phone.
Father Ramiro Castillo Castro, who had studied under Prevost in the 1990s, was among those who sent condolences. "Thank you, Ramiro," Prevost responded. "We have to pray a lot. Big hug."
"Polly and I send our love and prayers for you in these momentous days," wrote John Snider, a Lutheran pastor with whom Prevost had spent a summer in Minneapolis debating theology and learning how to minister to the sick and dying before they were both ordained.
Now, decades later, Snider was winding down his career, and Prevost was about to participate in a conclave to elect the next pope. "As I near retirement, 3 weeks, you are taking on such intense responsibility," he wrote. "God is with you!"
"Everything is in God's hands," responded Prevost, thanking the Sniders for their friendship through the years.
John Barry, Prevost's friend dating back to high school, was overcome by the news of Francis' death. "I know you were close to him and I'm sorry for your personal loss. The world has lost a great man. You also lost a friend," he wrote.
He offered his prayers and then turned to something that Prevost's friends around the world — in Illinois, in Peru, in Rome and elsewhere — were thinking.
"Okay, now Bob please don't get upset with me, but I believe what [their mutual friend] Jeanette first said — that you could possibly be the next pope. (Of course, you're too humble to entertain such thoughts.) I realize it's not a job a person would want, but in my heart I know you would make a great pope. You've obviously got the brains for the job. But your compassion, your kind heart, and your holiness are what really elevate you in my eyes. 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?"
Amid the flurry of activity in Rome, Prevost found the time to quickly write back.
"I just leave everything in the Lord's hands," he responded. "Francis' passing is a true loss ... it will take time to process. ... Thank you for your prayers!"
"Since I really don't think there will be a need to change addresses," he added at the end, "you can still write. … Just tell your dad that you call me by the right name!" (This was a reference to a running joke between the two of them about how upset Barry's father was that his son called his high-ranking cardinal friend "Bob.")
For all his friends' intuition, Prevost was not one of the cardinals initially focused on as a "papabile," a papal contender (the phrase literally means "pope-able" in Italian).
There were many reasons for that. Most prominent: Prevost was American.
An American had never been pope, and the prevailing conventional wisdom was that one never would be elected. The country already had too much influence over world events, some argued.
The political situation in the United States may have made the prospect of an American pope seem even more unlikely. President Trump had returned to power and had spent the first months of 2025 asserting his "America First" agenda on the world through brute force. And just as cardinals arrived in Rome in the wake of Francis' death, Trump posted an AI-generated image on social media depicting himself as the next pope, offending the cardinals and Catholics around the world.
So no one expected an American pope, certainly not in that moment.
"We're talking about a country that has political, economic, military power in the world," Chicago's archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, said in an interview with 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. … I'm not going to handicap anybody in terms of their chances. But I think that'd be a stretch."
Prevost read the article.
"Cupich said they aren't going to elect an American," he told his friend Father John Merkelis after the interview. "I'm sleeping well at night."
Merkelis relayed Prevost's sentiment to their old friend and mentor Sister Thérèse DelGenio, who had worked with both of them as they learned to minister to addicts in Calumet City, Ill., in the late 1970s.
"Oops," DelGenio responded. "He forgot about the Holy Spirit."
"I had never met the man"
Over the course of the next week, cardinals from around the world descended on Rome to mourn Francis and begin the process of electing the next pope.
That included the most high-profile cardinal in the U.S., New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan. One of the few voting cardinals who had also participated in the 2013 conclave, Dolan reveled in his seniority, even as he batted aside questions about his electability.
"I've got a better chance at batting cleanup for the Yankees than I do being pope," he joked to a reporter at the airport.
Dolan was an ally of Trump's. He had prayed at both of the president's inaugurations and served as a member of the White House's Religious Liberty Commission. As the church's leading representative in the media capital of the world for more than a decade, he was far more visible than his colleagues. And, as a jovial extrovert, he prided himself on knowing many, if not most, of the cardinals in the conclave.
And yet, as he flew to Rome, Robert Prevost was not on his radar at all.
But when he landed, he was bombarded by other cardinals who immediately began asking about his fellow American. What was he like? What were his interests? His temperament? Dolan was taken aback.
"I said, 'Who?'
"I didn't even think of him as an American," Dolan explained. "I mean, the little bit I knew about him was good — I had heard good things about him. But I had never met the man."
When the questions kept coming, Dolan realized he had to change that fact — and fast. He saw Prevost at a gathering of cardinals. Unlike many others, he noticed, Prevost was not working the room or approaching others to greet them. It wasn't aloofness that drove that behavior, though. Dolan thought it might just be shyness. He approached Prevost with an outstretched hand. "Robert, my name is Tim Dolan. I don't think I met you before."
The movie Conclave drives up excitement for the real thing
Starting the day after Francis died, the cardinals began assembling daily in an auditorium off St. Peter's Square. Sitting in a steep lecture hall, wearing laminated name tags over their black cassocks and red sashes, they held General Congregation meetings that often stretched on for hours, during which they would discuss the state of the church, the priorities its next leader would have to face, and what sort of qualities they wanted to see in him.
"On some days, it was a little disorganized," Cardinal Joseph Tobin, of New Jersey, admitted. "They said it was kind of like listening to an argument in an Italian barbershop while watching an episode of The Sopranos." Whenever order was eventually restored, Tobin said, the sessions would gravitate to the same big questions: "What does the church need? What does the world need? What are we hoping for, what are we dreaming about?"
Outside the walls of Vatican City, Rome was abuzz with excitement. Thousands of reporters from all over the world had poured into the city to cover the conclave. Every morning, crowds of journalists and religious pilgrims would swarm as soon as they saw a man in a red skullcap and black cassock walk into St. Peter's Square. The reporters would ask questions about the latest intrigue, while the pilgrims would ask for prayers and blessings. Some cardinals would stop — more often for the prayer requests than the questions — but others would keep walking.
The 2024 movie Conclave, which had been nominated for Best Picture at the recent Academy Awards, also drove up interest in the proceedings. The sumptuously shot adaptation of Robert Harris' novel was a political thriller about the selection of a new pope as the church is at a moral and political crossroads. It depicted cardinals whipping vote counts and debating campaign strategies as they smoked cigarettes in stairwells and glided through the ornate halls of the Vatican.
Many of the real-life cardinals insisted they hadn't watched the film, but Prevost had. He had talked about it with his brothers. His high school friends had asked him about it, too. They'd all, Prevost included, jokingly tried to match up each movie character with his real-life inspiration. It was all in good fun, but Prevost insisted to them he wasn't a Conclave character. Harris had written the book in 2016, he pointed out, before Prevost had been made a cardinal.
"If it does happen, let it be OK"
As the meetings went on, more cardinals began to seriously consider Prevost.
He was a close ally of Francis and committed to many of Francis' top priorities: making decisions through the more communal approach known in the church as synodality, standing up for immigrants and speaking up on the environment. He had spent years as a missionary and was arguably as closely tied to South America and Peru as he was to the United States. "The least-American American" was a phrase that suddenly began to pop up in news articles, attributed to various cardinals.
Prevost was also becoming increasingly attractive to some of the cardinals who wanted stylistic changes from the Francis era. Dolan was among them. As much as he praised Francis' heart and pastoral energy, Dolan and others hoped for something different from their next leader. "Non-flashy. Reliable. Not impetuous, not unscripted," he explained. "Just sort of measured, circumspect. Calm. There's not going to be any bombshells. You know, you're not going to have to wake up in the morning and say, 'How are we going to answer the questions about this statement?'"
Dolan began doing more homework on the quiet American. At one point, he asked a colleague, one who had worked closely with Prevost, for insight.
"He runs a good meeting," came the reply.
"Well, that sure is Irish praise," Dolan thought. "Is that all you can say about it?" But then, the answer's meaning settled more deeply. "I thought, maybe he meant that he knows what he's doing," Dolan later recalled. "He's got an agenda, he's ordered, he's got certain goals in mind."
Dolan had been a public face of the American church for two decades. But sitting in the General Congregation meetings, he began to consider that the first American pontiff might be a radically different kind of figure. During one of the meetings' many coffee breaks, he brought an espresso to an older cardinal, one who was too old to vote in the conclave.
They sat there together in the auditorium sipping their drinks.
"So, who do you think?" Dolan asked.
The older cardinal looked down toward a group of their peers at the front of the room. He pointed at Prevost.
Toward the end of their 12 meetings, the cardinals continued to talk through the qualities they wanted from the next pope. They wanted someone to continue the fight against sexual abuse in the church. To fix the Vatican's disorganized finances. To continue Francis' push to reform the Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia. To work for peace throughout the world. They also wanted someone who, like Francis, prioritized the environment and the need to fully address climate change.
As he heard all this, Peruvian Cardinal Pedro Barreto laughed. The 81-year-old Jesuit was too old to vote in the coming conclave, but he could suddenly see how it would play out. Abuse? Prevost had headed the Peruvian bishops' council to address it. Economic reform? He had played a leading role in working to address church finances in Peru, as well. Fixing the Curia? He'd been in Rome two years — enough time to learn the ropes, but not enough time to become an entrenched member himself. He kept going down the list of priorities.
"Check, check, check, check, check," Barreto said to himself. His friend Robert could become pope — if the cardinals could get over the fact he was an American.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin was coming around to the idea, too. He had known Bob, as he called him, for three decades. They had worked together in Rome, when Prevost ran the Augustinians and Tobin headed his order, the Redemptorists, and then again in Peru.
One night, Tobin, Prevost and several other cardinals gathered together to pray and share dinner. As the evening wrapped up, Tobin took his friend aside.
"I think you may be asked," he said. "So all I'm doing is praying for you."
Prevost didn't debate Tobin or try to dissuade him. He simply thanked him for his prayers. He knew he had no control over his destiny.
Forty years earlier, as a student in Rome, he had voiced a similar feeling in a letter to his friends John and Polly Snider as he waited for his next assignment. It might have been in Rome, he said, or the U.S. It might have been in Peru. He just didn't know. But he had trusted God at that moment, as he had at every other juncture in his life.
As the May 7 start to the conclave approached, he faced a similar crossroads. He had started, in recent years, to fantasize about retirement. Now there was a realistic possibility he'd head the church, and in the process become one of the most famous and influential people in the world. As daunting as that was, he was determined to, as always, give himself over to God's will.
"I took a deep breath," he later said. "I said, "Here we go, Lord. You're in charge. You lead the way.'"
In New Lenox, Ill., John Prevost was praying, too.
Like his brother, John had at first dismissed the idea of an American being elected to the papacy. But as he'd heard the reports and debates, doubts had begun to creep in.
After a Mass at St. Jude, the priest, Father John Merkelis, had approached him to say that his brother currently had the same odds that Jorge Bergoglio had faced going into the 2013 conclave. Merkelis took it as a sign. He joked to John that he had briefly considered pointing him out in the pews that night and telling the congregation they were joined by the brother of the future pope.
"Don't you dare," John Prevost quickly responded. He didn't want that kind of attention. He didn't want his brother to become pope, either. That would mean an end to his brother's visits home, an end to his life as he currently knew it.
He prayed that night for it not to happen. "Then I said, 'Well, if it does happen, let it be OK." Then, as his prayers continued, another shift. "Not my will," he said, "but, what's good for the church."
The day before the conclave began, Robert Prevost went to the Augustinian General Curia, as he often did, to pray and eat with about a dozen fellow Augustinians. He talked with Father Alejandro Moral Antón, the man who'd succeeded him as the order's prior general. They then prayed together to the Holy Spirit, asking it to accompany Prevost and the other 132 electors as they entered the Sistine Chapel the next day.
When the prayer was done, Moral Antón turned to Prevost and told him he was always welcome to return to the Augustinian community for meals, Mass and prayer, no matter what color he happened to be wearing.
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