Welcome back to James Pope. I'm Joe Heschmeier and Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago, Illinois,

was just named today the new Pope, Pope Leo the 14th. He is the first American Pope, and this comes

literally one day after on Lila Rose's show, I said, well, he was the most likely American to become

pope. There probably wouldn't be an American Pope this time around, and he was probably unlikely.

What are the odds that we get an American Pope? I would say very low but not zero. Okay. Prevost is the name that I, someone's here thrown around as a possibility because of his work with the congregation for bishops, he knows a lot of the cardinals. If you had a percentage, you would say Cardinal Prevost is going to be the next Pope, this American Cardinal. What would you give it? I would put it in the low single digits. So, Mayacopa, he did indeed become Pope. I said it would be someone unexpected, and on that count at least, I was right. So what do we know about the Cardinal? As you can imagine, this is going to be a little more informal. I'm in John Wayne Airport. There's Newzac and people walking by, but I wanted to make sure to get something out just because people are asking me, what do we know about him so far? We know a little bit. We don't know a ton. He actually only became a cardinal in 2023. So he is somewhat of an unknown, I think, even to the other cardinals. But here's what we do know.

First, his papal name is a really fascinating choice. Poblio the 14th, this seems to be a nod to

Pope Leo the 13th, who was Pope from 1878 to 1903. That coupled with his more kind of traditional

looking papal garb is telling an interesting sign. He didn't feel the need

to be John Paul III or Francis II or anything like that. Right now, I think a lot of what you're

going to be hearing are just rumors or speculation or things that aren't very based in fact. But the Catholic

Herald last week put it like this. They said, prevost is something of a cipher when it comes to many of the contested issues in Catholic life. In terms of where he stands on matters such as the ordination of women deacons or the blessing of persons in same-sex unions or the Latin Mass, he's played his cards awfully close to his chest. So he's not someone who's like known for having strong, maybe doctrinaire positions in either direction.

He has a reputation, if anything, of maybe being something of a centrist, which could be very interesting.

We just don't know. And so I would avoid anyone claiming to know more than we have information to support.

On some issues, you know, the black and white issues,

like women's ordination of the priesthood, he's been perfectly clear. But a lot of the other issues seem like they just have not come up in a way where he's had to address them. And so we're just guessing what he would do in those contexts. So he, as I say, here's a little bit of what we know. He was born in Chicago. He's the first

American Pope. He was born in 1959, so he's 69 years old. He actually went to Villanova for college, where he studied math. He then joined the Augustinian religious order. He then, the Augustinian sent him to Chicago Theological Union, where he got his MDiv. He went on to Rome, to my own alma mater, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, better known as the Angelicum, where he got his MDiv. He went on to Rome to my own alma mater, the Pontifical University of

St. Thomas Aquinas, better known as the Angelicum, where he got both his license and his doctorate

in canon law. And I think this is actually really interesting. His doctoral thesis was on the role of

the local prior in the order of St. Augustineans. Now, I suspect that's going to actually be an interesting

dimension that'll play out in his pontificate. Pope Francis talked a lot about the Senate on

synodality and this concept of synodality, but the critique was, what do you mean by this?

Like, this term seems amorphous. What does it actually mean to talk about the church in a

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