By Mark Ellis –
The first American pope’s Chicago roots were made evident in interviews with his brother John Prevost, still living in a middle class neighborhood in New Lenox, Illinois, south of Chicago.
John missed the call from his brother immediately after he was named pope, according to a May 9 interview on Good Morning America.
John was able to get through to his brother Robert, now known as Pope Leo XIV, and expressed his congratulations.
“Where have you been?” the new pope asked his brother.
“Outside talking to people, so I didn’t hear the phone ring,” he said, in their brief, 30-second conversation.
From the time he was a child, Pope Leo knew he wanted to enter the priesthood, John told GMA. “From the time he was five or six years old, he knew he would be a priest. He knew that from a very young age, and his idea never faltered all through grammar school, high school, and college.”
Pope Leo played at being a priest as a child. “He would take our mom’s ironing board, and covered over it with a tablecloth, then we would go to Mass.”
Necco wafer candy discs, which resemble communion wafers, were used by the child priest in their play. “It was all taken seriously. It was not a joke with him,” John told GMA.
The pope’s brother became a Catholic school teacher and principal in his career. John is unsure about the derivation of his brother’s calling. “I don’t know if he was born with it, or if it was a seed planted by our parents, Somewhere the seed of faith was planted in us.”
Their father and mother are now deceased, but would have felt joy and pride if they had lived to see this moment, he said. “I think eventually there would come worry as to how Robert is going to handle this, because it’s a heavy weight on his shoulders.”
John expressed his own apprehensions. “It’s quite a responsibility that he’s going to face now, because he’s got the task of trying to bring the world’s Catholics together. I think we’re splitting apart, quickly splitting and maybe he can do something to bring it back. People are leaving the church. There’s factions in the church. There’s more than one side to an option. I think he’s got to try to face those things and somehow talk about it, and bring people together to talk about it, to get worldwide opinions.
John believes his brother will walk in the footsteps of Pope Francis. “I think you will see kind of a second Pope Francis. I think he’ll follow in Pope Francis’s footsteps in terms of some of the policies and the way he conducts himself.
“I’m saying he’s going to follow Pope Francis’s footstep, because he knows there are the downtrodden, he knows there are the poor. He knows there are the disenfranchised, the people who don’t have a voice. And so I think he will be looking out for that, because that’s where he spent so many years with those people who he worked with and knows what their needs may be, and maybe he can do something to help them.”
Initial news reports said the new pope is a Chicago Cubs fan, but John corrected the record to say he is definitely a White Sox fan. “I’m sure it’s important for the country to know that,” John told GMA, with a touch of dry humor.
John said he will still be calling his brother Rob, rather than pope. “I never called him Father either,” he said.
Another antiChrist from the Vatican, in a long line of them.
But after THE Antichrist rule, the Lord Jesus will return from Heaven on horseback, with eyes like fire and a sharp sword strapped to His thigh and He will rule and reign, a thousand years with His chosen.