How Father Bob Became Pope Leo

Father Robert Prevost told the Peruvian soldiers to back off. It was the mid-1990s, and the troops, armed to the teeth, had stopped and boarded a minibus carrying the American priest and a group of young Peruvian seminarians. Citing a law that exempted clerics from military service, Father Prevost told the soldiers, “No, these young men are going to be priests, they cannot go to the barracks,” said the Rev. In those days, Father Prevost and the seminarians traveled the country, re-enacting scenes, sometimes in costume as an insurgent or a soldier, to prompt conversations and help heal the country scarred by the bitter conflicts. These were dramatizations of dramatic times that Father Prevost had lived through as a missionary who found his voice, in Peru.