Mildred Prevost would wake her sons up the same way every Friday. Before dawn, the lights would turn on at 212 East 141st Place in Dolton, and she would lean into the doorways of her boys’ bedrooms. “Let’s go to Mass.” Louis, John, and Robert would stumble out of bed and get themselves ready for the 6:30 service as their father, Louis, headed to work as a school administrator.
No breakfast was served — the Catholic Church at that point required a lengthy fast before Communion. With empty bellies and eyes heavy with sleep, Mildred and the boys would pile into the car and head north along one of Dolton’s main drags, Indiana Avenue, crossing over two sets of train tracks that snaked through and defined the south suburban village. Then they would hang a right on 138th Street, the border between Dolton and Chicago, and park in front of St. Mary of the Assumption in Riverdale.
The church was mostly empty at that hour — only a handful of the most dedicated parishioners would show up, grouping themselves in the front pews. John hated the early wake-up — “It’s one of those things you did because your mom wanted you to,” he later recalled — but to his youngest brother, Robert, who had been serving as an altar boy from a young age, those mornings were “beautiful.” Other altar boys viewed assisting during services as a necessary job, a slog, especially when they drew the short straw of the predawn Mass. Robert, however, saw it as the beginning of a lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ.
Prayer was central in the Prevost home. The family would pray before meals and before bed. And after dinner, Louis and Mildred would often go into the living room, turn off the radio and TV, and pray the rosary. “It was modeling,” John would explain later.
Like many Catholic kids, Robert would sometimes “play priest,” using an ironing board as his altar and Necco wafers for Communion. But when he was even younger, he had daydreamed about another career: truck driver. He was enamored with cars and other moving vehicles, particularly the rigs and trailers that a neighbor would occasionally park in the street. Robert became obsessed with everything on wheels, learning to identify makes and models from details down to the bumper. On family vacations, he would look out the car window to call out the other vehicles on the road.
When the Prevosts arrived in Dolton in 1949, two years before their first son was born and six years before Robert’s birth, the town’s population was still relatively small — roughly 3,500 — but the surrounding area was booming with postwar industrial activity. Freight trains as long as a mile often stopped traffic for a half hour or more as they carried supplies to and from the major steel mills of Chicago’s South Side. Dolton’s rail lines and quality schools attracted not only factory employees but also white-collar workers, who would commute to banks and law firms downtown. The Dolton of the 1950s was almost entirely white. And it was growing fast. By 1955, its population had tripled from the beginning of the decade. It would double again by 1960, to just under 20,000.
Dolton was the Prevost boys’ world. Life for Robert, who went by Rob inside the family, centered on neighborhood play. The boys would ride bikes, play tag or baseball in yards and the street, and just run around. (One memorable day, climbing in the backyard, Robert fell through the roof of a shed their dad had been building.) At home they’d play Risk and Monopoly and argue over what shows or games to watch on the color TV in the living room. It was a divided household as far as baseball was concerned: Mildred and Marty (as the family called the younger Louis) rooted for the Cubs, Louis cheered for the St. Louis Cardinals, and Robert pulled for the White Sox.
For most of Robert’s childhood, the family didn’t celebrate Halloween. His mother thought trick-or-treating was “begging.” His father disagreed and finally persuaded her to relent when Robert and John were in middle school.
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Meanwhile, Louis rose through the ranks of the public school system in south suburban Glenwood, eventually reaching the office of superintendent, where he spent the bulk of his time managing the crush of new students brought on by the baby boom and pushing for new school buildings and resources. Mildred, in addition to taking care of the children, put her library science degree to work serving as a librarian at several different institutions, including Chicago’s Mendel Catholic High School, which John and Marty would eventually attend.
For most of Robert’s childhood, the family didn’t celebrate Halloween. His mother thought trick-or-treating was “begging.” His father disagreed and finally persuaded her to relent when Robert and John were in middle school. Christmas, though, was always a big family affair, with aunts and uncles filling their small home. One year, Robert got a truck. But soon after the gifts were unwrapped, Mildred shared an idea. “There’s a family in need nearby, and they don’t have any gifts for their children,” she told the family. “What do you think about sharing something with them?” She talked to Robert about giving his beloved new toy to the cause, and he agreed.
Mildred and Louis worked hard to shape their sons’ faith, intellect, and sense of morals on a daily basis. At family dinners, Louis would push the boys to make them think, pressing for details about their day or asking big questions. One friend recalled going over to the Prevost house for dinner, only to have Louis interrogate him on his opinion about school busing.
Louis also tried to teach the boys French, their grandmother’s native language, by playing French records around the house. Both parents would frequently bring visitors over for dinner and make sure to include the boys in the conversation. One time, it was a probation officer. Another, a Spanish priest from the Augustinian order Louis was working with to assist Hispanic immigrants in his school district. Nuns and priests from St. Mary’s were regular dinner guests, too.
The majority of the boys’ religious education came from those nuns and priests. By 1957, St. Mary’s swelling parish had outgrown its old sanctuary, prompting it to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new structure. The parish hosted winter dances, summer picnics, and trips to see Notre Dame football and White Sox baseball. The church also housed a Cub Scout pack that Robert was a member of. After Mass and parish events, families would crowd into Papa Damiani’s Pizza across the street and eat paper-thin slices as the kids buzzed from table to table.
The Prevosts usually attended 9:15 Mass on Sunday mornings, in addition to the early Friday morning service. Decades later, friends and neighbors would remember the Prevost family sitting together on the left side of the church, facing a statue of Mary and an American flag. Robert would pray with his hands pressed together, his fingers pointed straight at the sky; Mildred, meanwhile, would belt out hymns in a warbly, operatic voice. She had been singing on stages for decades and kept doing so at St. Mary’s into her later years. She was a regular in the choir, parish musical reviews, and cabarets, performing Broadway show tunes in a top hat and vest. One year, the parish put on Fiddler on the Roof in the old church, which had been turned into a school hall and gymnasium. Mildred played Golde, the matriarch.
Mildred and Louis seemed to be involved in just about every parish activity. Food drives? You could drop your items off at the Prevost house. Polio vaccination clinics? The local paper noted that Mildred had “expressed regret that so many mothers with small children were unable to get their shots at the clinic held last week,” but assured readers that a second clinic was quickly being organized. Rosary prayer groups often met in the Prevosts’ living room.
For several years, Mildred served as president of the Altar and Rosary Society, St. Mary’s main women’s group. In 1959, monthly meetings included a hat-making demonstration, several book clubs, and an event focused on “fur facts,” with a door prize of a mink collar going to one lucky member. By the mid-1960s, the meeting topics had shifted to “Menopause — Friend or Foe?” and “Moral Decay in Literature.” Mildred also headed the society’s “decency brigade” at one point and spent time helming Dolton’s Decent Literature Committee, which, among other activities, would inspect local post offices “to determine if any type of salacious material has been discovered in the mail.”
The Prevosts’ devotion to their parish included their pocketbooks. In the late 1960s, in an effort to spur more contributions, the church started to publish every parishioner’s quarterly contribution totals. Quarter after quarter, despite Louis’s relatively modest salary, the Prevost family was among the parish’s top contributors.
Attendance at a Catholic school is not automatic ‘open sesame’ to eternal salvation,” St. Mary’s parish priests wrote in a bulletin in September 1962. “But it sure can put plenty of oil on the lock.”
Around the Chicago area, Catholic parents seemed to agree with that sentiment: Roughly two-thirds of Catholic children in Chicago’s archdiocese attended parish schools at that point, at a moment when the church prioritized building and running grammar schools at every parish to better steep young Catholics in its teachings and customs. All three Prevost boys went to elementary school at St. Mary’s, as did many, if not most, of the Catholic children in their neighborhood.
Every morning at 7:30, a dozen school buses would fan out across Dolton and neighboring Riverdale to pick up St. Mary’s students. Those who lived nearby, like the Prevosts, would walk or catch a short car ride from their parents. Girls wore blue dresses or skirts — “no above-the-knee fashions will be tolerated,” warned the parish bulletin one year — and boys wore slacks or suit pants, usually tan. (“Extreme haircuts or hairdos for boys and girls are taboo,” administrators noted in 1965.) Tuition was $50 a year, though with so many large families in the parish, the school capped the cost at two students per family. As the youngest of three, Robert would have received free tuition during the time the boys overlapped. The school was a hulking turn-of-the-century brick building with thick-paned windows. Green chalkboards lined the sides and front of the classrooms, and the cafeteria was in the basement. There wasn’t a playground — just a big asphalt parking lot where the kids would play games during recess.
By all accounts, Robert Prevost was the smartest in his class, but his classmates never picked on him or resented the way teachers praised his grades and test scores. (Mr. Connors, a middle school teacher who had bonded with Prevost, would regularly bellow “Bobby Prevo got another A!” when returning tests.) “He was on a different level. Disciplined, focused. Not a troublemaker,” recalled one classmate. He never bragged about any of it.
In second grade, students prepared for two milestone moments in a Catholic child’s life: making their first confession and Communion. Taking part in those rites for the first time marked a more serious participation in the church and the liturgy, the direct encounter with two core tenets of the faith: the idea that, through Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, God would forgive everyone’s sins; and the idea that Jesus was always physically present in the Eucharist through the transformation of bread and wine into his body and blood. As part of the preparation, teachers drilled students every morning on the Baltimore Catechism, a question-and-answer document that defined Catholicism’s beliefs and teachings for nearly a century. They would have to go to the chalkboard and write out the answer to any given question (“What is this sin in us called? The sin in us is called original”; “Why is this sin called original? The sin is called original because it comes down to us through our origin, or descent, from Adam”; and so on).
Each grade at St. Mary’s had about 80 students, divided into two or three classrooms, depending on the year. At recess they would naturally segregate by gender, the girls jumping rope — double Dutch, or Chinese jump rope, as they called it at the time — while the boys played soccer or football. Prevost usually didn’t join in. Instead, he would spend recess standing around and talking to a small group of friends. He was quiet, but not exactly shy. He didn’t cause trouble, but he would observe and be entertained by whatever grade school mischief was taking place around him, often flashing a subtle smile. “I always felt like he had a secret,” said a classmate.
Students who were caught misbehaving faced the harsh discipline the Catholic grammar schools of the era became known for. Teachers would make students slap themselves in the face or kneel while holding heavy dictionaries in their outstretched arms. Overly talkative students would have to draw a circle on the chalkboard and then stand there with their nose in it or, worse, would have to sit in a garbage can in front of everyone during class.
By all accounts, Robert was the smartest in his class at St. Mary’s. “He was on a different level. Disciplined, focused. Not a troublemaker,” recalled one classmate.
Life at St. Mary’s was like being in a protective, insular bubble, separated from the events of the outside world. An exception came on November 22, 1963. There was a lot of excitement in the air that day. The next night was the parish’s annual fall dance. St. Mary’s had booked a band, the Tune Twisters. Then, in the afternoon, an announcement crackled over the loudspeaker: The president had been shot. Everyone at school needed to pray.
President John F. Kennedy’s sudden death shocked the nation, but especially Catholic parishes like St. Mary’s. School was called off for a week, and the big dance was rescheduled to New Year’s Eve. At home on 141st Place, Mildred watched the funeral in the living room with Robert, John, and Marty. She held a box of tissues and cried throughout the Mass.
A year earlier, in September 1962, a few weeks after Robert Prevost began second grade, St. Mary’s parishioners were urged to attend special Masses and devote themselves to special prayers and penance to help ensure the success of a remarkable meeting about to begin in Rome. “A month from this week, some 3,000 Bishops will open the Second Vatican General Council at Rome — an event of tremendous importance,” the announcement in the weekly church bulletin read. All throughout the archdiocese, additional Masses would be said and confessions would be heard. “We sincerely expect that ALL of our people will do that LITTLE EXTRA in the spirit of true prayer needed during this most momentous hour in our times in the Church.”
The ecumenical council, the first in nearly a hundred years, had been the idea of Pope John XXIII. It was time, he believed, to breathe new life into the faith, in the same way the Holy Spirit had first inspired and energized the early apostles in the wake of Jesus’s ascension. He told cardinals he hoped the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as it came to be called, would take place in the Italian spirit of aggiornamento, or “bringing up to date.” The Curia, the church’s central administrative body in Rome, was skeptical of the value and feasibility of the lofty goals. It also feared the rapid and large-scale changes that would take place if John succeeded.
Over the course of centuries, the Catholic Church had become an increasingly strict hierarchy, with clergy of different ranks ruling the faithful from on high. The laypeople in the congregations listened and did what they were told. That dynamic was reflected in local parishes and communities across the world. In Dolton, the priests at St. Mary’s were elevated and adored. When a priest walked into a classroom, every student would immediately stand up and say, in unison, “Good morning, Father!” On Father Weiler’s birthdays, the entire student body would gather outside the rectory to sing “Happy Birthday” to the church’s pastor. “The default was, these folks are godly,” said one of Prevost’s classmates. “They are much closer to heaven than we are. They’re closer to God than we are.”
There was a downside to that dynamic. The church bulletin, the main form of communication within the parish, was often filled with scolding, judgmental criticisms and dictates to the congregation. One week a notice said the priests had felt a “spiritual nausea” when they saw parishioners slip out of Mass a few minutes early. “It is very sad that so many of our people are diseased in spirit — they will surely die and forever,” it warned. During the Lenten season in 1964, the bulletin called out parishioners, week after week, for low attendance. “To be considered a practicing Catholic,” it warned, “one must receive Holy Communion during this period of time. This is the MINIMUM of Catholic Practice. If you consider it the MAXIMUM then you are in a sorry spiritual state. The odds on your gaining God’s Kingdom would be fabulous.”
This was precisely the tone and approach that Pope John hoped Vatican II would begin to change. But most famously, Vatican II would change the structure of the Mass itself. For nearly 500 years, in much of the English-speaking world, Mass had been a closed-off service to be observed from a distance. The priest and altar boys would recite the liturgy in Latin and Greek, and for most of the Mass, the priest’s back would be to the pews. Some people would follow along in their Latin-English missals, while others would say the rosary, pray silently, or simply zone out.
Going forward after Vatican II, the priest would face the congregation during the most holy part of the Mass, when he prayed over the bread and wine as it transformed, per church teachings, into the body and blood of Jesus. This meant physically changing the structure of churches around the world — installing new altars or repositioning the existing ones. The Mass was simplified and translated into the vernacular. It also became more interactive, with the entire congregation, not just the altar servers and choirs, singing and responding to prayers.
The changes became a reality at St. Mary’s, as well as in other Catholic churches across the United States, in November 1964, just after Thanksgiving. “You guys are going to have it so easy now,” Robert Prevost joked later on when he was in middle school and training a new group of altar boys. “The Mass is going to be in English. You won’t have to learn Latin.” By that point, Robert was viewed by many younger altar boys as a leader in the church. He had been delegated more responsibilities by the priests and nuns who coordinated the servers.
The servers had been more deeply involved in the Mass before Vatican II, the cross bearers, especially. They would kneel with the priest in front of the altar and take an active role in prayers, serving as the sole representative for the whole congregation with their Latin responses to the priest’s prayers. Even then, though, many altar boys would goof off during Mass. One recalled sneaking downstairs to the church basement after a funeral to smoke cigars or steal sips of sacramental wine.
Not Robert. At first, he didn’t have a choice but to fully focus: His mother, sitting in the pews at each Mass, was watching closely. (“We both better take it seriously,” said his brother John, “or we’d hear about it on the way home.”) But that morphed into a deeper motivation, and soon Robert was serving at as many as three Masses a week — at least once alongside both his older brothers. It was more than a chore or a task. It was, to the boy, bonding with Jesus. “He is your best friend,” Robert said years later, looking back on those mornings. “And Mass was a way to find that friend, to be with Jesus.”
Before long, some of the younger boys, seeing how intense Robert was about serving at church, started to call him “Father Bob.”
The younger servers noticed — and began to take their cues from him. “He would just kind of instruct on the fly, even sometimes during Mass if you weren’t carrying the chalice up at the right time,” said a classmate. “He was very patient.”
Another altar boy remembers a morning when, ahead of a feast day Mass, Robert taught them how to use the thurible — the ornate metal vessel on a chain that altar boys and priests use to burn incense. It was a complicated setup to get right: First, you had to open up the container, get a charcoal briquette to light and to stay lit, and sprinkle just the right amount of incense on top. After that, you had to position the thurible in the right corner of the sacristy so the incense smoke would spread throughout the church. Robert walked the other servers through it step by step. Before long, some of the younger boys, seeing how intense Robert was about serving, started to call him “Father Bob.”
As high school approached, Robert was beginning to think of himself that way, too.
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The late 1960s were a turbulent and violent time, especially in Chicago, the site of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. The city had experienced riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. earlier that year. The Vietnam War had been raging for years — by 1968, nearly half a million American soldiers had been sent overseas to fight in the increasingly unpopular conflict — and students were beginning to lead public demonstrations to voice their disagreement with the war.
But, by and large, the isolated bubble of parish life held: John Prevost later said the only times he remembered adults talking to him about these events were during the Chicago riots, when they urged students to keep an eye out on their walk home from school.
The late ’60s were the tail end of an era during which the Catholic Church trained its priests in high schools known as minor seminaries. That meant that boys who felt a calling to the priesthood — a vocation, as the church calls it — were being asked to take their first step toward a life of prayer and chastity as young as age 12 or 13. Interest in the priesthood was surging at that point, and competition among the various orders for potential new priests was fierce. All the different orders — the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Vincentians — visited the homes of interested candidates, some recruiting in the style of college football coaches.
It was obvious to Robert’s whole family that he’d been on the path to priesthood since he was in first grade. His brothers would tease him about it, joking that he wanted to become the pope one day. He’d say later that wasn’t quite true. That while he had long been drawn to the idea of a life of service centered on the church, he’d been interested in other careers too: education, like his parents; law; political science. “Priesthood was a part of that, but it wasn’t necessarily clearly defined,” he said.
That began to change as high school approached. He was a standout student, an unusually devout teenager, and someone whose parents were deeply connected to the church. All of those factors made him a top recruit for the various religious orders. The recruiters began to visit the Prevost home to make their sales pitches, sitting with Robert and his family in the living room to talk.
Orders, which are communities of consecrated individuals, play a particular role in the Catholic Church. They are not part of the diocesan structure that runs most Catholic schools and parishes. Their members’ assignments, living arrangements, and other important decisions are determined by their respective superiors. They are allowed to open their own schools and parishes, with the approval of the local bishop, and many do.
Every order has a unique charism, or spiritual gift, often connected to its founder and thought to be bestowed by the Holy Spirit so that it may serve the church. The Jesuits, for example, tend to focus on education and run some of the most prominent Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. The Franciscans are known for their simplicity and their concern for the poor and for nature — the core tenets of St. Francis’s teachings.
Robert, however, was most intrigued by the Augustinians, the order of friars who ran the high school that John and Marty attended. Their charism derives from St. Augustine, one of the most influential figures in Western Christianity. The author of Confessions and The City of God, as well as hundreds of sermons, letters, and polemics, Augustine, a Catholic convert, was born in 354 in present-day Algeria. The Rule of St. Augustine — his short guide for living harmoniously in community — was written around 400 and is the oldest monastic rule in the Catholic Church, a template for future communities of friars, monks, and nuns, filled with axioms like “Don’t put private interests ahead of communal ones.” Augustinians still consider the rule to be their guide and take their motto — “One mind and one heart on the way to God” — from its second precept.
Robert knew the Augustinians from his brothers’ high school. He also remembered the Spanish Augustinian who had been a guest at the family’s dinner table years ago. He had enraptured young Robert when he talked to Louis about helping migrants in Chicago Heights. The son of two educators liked the idea of an order that focused on teaching, as well as the excitement of the Augustinian missions in Peru and elsewhere.
Still, all the Prevosts recall that Robert could have gone in multiple directions. “I do remember him saying,” said John, “when he went to a Vincentian retreat, the food was delicious, and had they come first, he might have chosen them.” Robert also seriously considered the Salesians, a community focused on education, especially the education of the poor. “You came in second place — I’m sorry!” he joked to a gathering of Salesians decades later. But after a flurry of meetings, visits, and various high school seminary entrance exams, Robert decided to join the Augustinians.
That decision would mean leaving home, leaving his family and the narrow geographic boundaries of Dolton and the insular St. Mary’s parish community that had defined his life for his first 13 years. The Augustinian minor seminary was a boarding school two hours away from Dolton, on the other side of Lake Michigan.
Robert graduated from St. Mary’s in June 1969. The 82 eighth-grade graduates, many of whom had sat in the same classrooms, run around on the same playgrounds, and shuffled into the same church services for eight years, beamed in their graduation photos. They were headed their separate ways into wider worlds, be they large public high schools or Catholic schools where they would mix with boys and girls from different parishes. Wearing a cap and gown, Robert flashed a rare toothy grin in his graduation photo. His thick, expressive eyebrows arched as he looked off to the side.
The cultural forces in Dolton and St. Mary’s were still holding the ’60s at bay, but not for much longer. As rock musicians played Woodstock that summer, and as Californians shuddered at the Manson Family murders, Dolton’s movie theaters screened Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Lion in Winter, and the parish advertised a polka dance. Changes were coming, though: Two weeks after astronauts first landed on the moon that July, the church where priests had once scolded parishioners for not wearing their hats properly was organizing an outdoor guitar folk Mass for its teenagers.
In early September, Mildred, Louis, and John drove Robert to his new home: St. Augustine Seminary High School near Holland, Michigan. The two-hour drive took them along the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan. No one said much as Louis drove the car. Everyone was lost in their own thoughts. They arrived, then helped Robert unload his luggage and unpack it in his new dorm room.
When the rest of the family returned to the car without him, the reality hit: The youngest member of the family had struck out on his own. Robert would no longer live with them at 141st Place. He’d no longer be at the breakfast or dinner table, or riding with them to morning Mass. Robert was still a kid — just days from turning 14. But he was dedicating himself to something beyond family now: He was dedicating himself to the church and to God.
The only noise on the long drive home was John’s and Mildred’s tears.
Excerpted from American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road From the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City by Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow. © 2026 by the authors. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.