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It has been a busy spring at Letters from Leo, and the essay that has sat unfinished on the desk the longest is the one trying to keep up with John Prevost.

The pope’s older brother has spent most of April and the first week of May in front of cameras and notebooks.

EWTN News got him first, on April 17, with Augustinian pastor Father Ray Flores, OSA at his side. Three days later, Youna Rivallain came in from Paris for La Croix and met him at his rectory in New Lenox, Illinois. NBC 5’s Mary Ann Ahern brought a camera crew into his living room two days after that.

And on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the conclave, Erin Burnett pulled him onto CNN’s OutFront in primetime.

What follows is the catch-up — twenty things we now know about Pope Leo XIV that we did not know before his older brother started talking.

Here is a glimpse of what is inside.

Pope Leo and John still speak every day. With Louis — the eldest Prevost brother, who lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast and visited President Trump at the White House last May — it is once a week.

Louis has happily told cameras, in his own words, that he is “all MAGA.”

The president of the United States has made the family politics public. “I like his brother Louis much better than I like him,” Trump said last spring, “because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t!”

John talked, in interview after interview, about how the three of them try to get along with Louis despite his politics. The brothers, John kept saying, have decided to refuse to let President Trump get in the way of the love they have for each other.

We learn that the pope answers his own personal email, sometimes between turns of Words With Friends with John on FaceTime.

Father Ray Flores, OSA — the Augustinian pastor of John’s parish, and a close personal friend of both Prevost brothers — confirmed in La Croix that Leo’s Palm Sunday homily, the one that declared God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” was directed personally at Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration.

John, for his part, follows his brother’s papacy mostly by watching the news. And in 1960, the three Prevost boys met Bozo together.

There is a film of it, somewhere, in WGN’s archive.

I went through three television interviews and one print interview, in two languages, to bring you what follows.

The biggest reveal of the EWTN interview was almost a throwaway line. John dropped it casually: when he was in third grade, Robert in second, and the eldest, Louis (Marty), in fifth, the three brothers appeared on Bozo’s Circus — the WGN-produced kids’ show that was must-see local television in 1960s Chicago.

Tickets to Bozo were notoriously hard to come by. The brothers got in because a member of the WGN house band taught music at the Catholic school where their father was the superintendent. Their father called in the favor. The boys jumped at it: you would be on TV.

“We were just in the crowd — and then in the grand march at the end where they line everyone up walking out. So you would see him in that. Absolutely.” — John Prevost on EWTN, recalling Bozo’s Circus, c. 1960

If the footage survives in WGN’s archives, somewhere on tape is a film of a six-year-old boy from Dolton walking the grand march of a clown variety show, sixty-five years before he would walk out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s.

John remembered the moment without ceremony. The boys had built a backyard shed out of recycled materials, and the roof was constructed from old doors taken from the house. Some of the wood was already rotting. Robert stepped on the wrong board.

“Rob fell through the roof. It was just part of the wood was rotted. He just does stuff like that.” — John Prevost on EWTN

Other Prevost-brother data points from the same boyhood: when the train crossings on Dolton’s railroad tracks went down for forty-five minutes at a time, certain kids in the neighborhood were known to climb over the parked rail cars to get home. EWTN’s reporter Mark Irons pressed: was that a young Rob? John’s answer: “No comment. Can’t say.”