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Two months into his pontificate, a man named Robert Prevost picked up the phone from the Vatican and called his bank in South Chicago. He wanted to update the phone number on his account.
The teller asked the standard security questions, and he answered every one of them. Then her screen flagged his file: any further changes had to be made in person, at the branch, with a photo ID.
Coming in person would not be possible, he told her, in the polite tone of a man who knew the answer before he asked the question. The teller apologized.
He paused, then asked: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?”
She hung up on him.
That story belongs to Father Tom McCarthy, an Augustinian friar from the south side of Chicago who has known Robert Francis Prevost — Pope Leo XIV — for forty-three years. McCarthy told it to a parish men’s club at Saints Peter and Paul outside Chicago this past Sunday, the night before flying to Peru to take up the same post Leo himself once held: provincial of the Midwest Augustinians.
Sixty interviews into the post-conclave whirlwind, McCarthy now opens his emails to the pope with a hopeful “Dear HF Leo” — short for Holy Father Leo, his play on the “Dear FR” (Father) salutation priests use among themselves. The pope writes back signing off with a single “L,” sometimes “Leo.” McCarthy still slips back to “Bob” when he tells stories from the years before the white cassock.
What McCarthy described over the course of an hour was a portrait of a pope who is, by every visible measure, an extraordinarily ordinary man. He is the first missionary in history to become pope and the first American to wear the white cassock.
Before his election he had earned a doctorate in canon law from the Lateran and visited every Augustinian community on earth — fifty countries, twice. He spent twenty-two of his forty-three years as a priest in the slums of northern Peru, where his order has been building churches from nothing since 1963.
In McCarthy’s telling, he is also a man who eats whatever is put in front of him — pigeon egg soup in Taiwan, anything in Peru — because he understands his hosts are giving him their best. His brother told reporters the closet in the Apostolic Palace holds two stockpiles of marshmallow Peeps.
When McCarthy turned up at the Vatican last fall with two duffel bags of gifts from friends back home, the pope dug through them and lit up at a pound of Fanny May turtles a parishioner had tucked inside. “Nobody’s brought me any,” he said.
Last summer, four teenage Minnesota Twins fans staked out the popemobile’s route through Saint Peter’s Square with one strategy: scream “White Sox” loud enough to be heard. The pope swiveled and shouted “White Sox” back.
The boys spend the rest of the resulting YouTube interview in a kind of euphoric disbelief. Nine St. Rita moms tried the same trick in October with a poster naming the priest who’d brought a young Bob Prevost into the seminary, and Leo gave them a thumbs up from the popemobile.
These stories form the architecture of a papacy. The case McCarthy made — and only an old friend can really make it — is that to understand Leo, you have to understand he has been formed as an Augustinian since he was fourteen, when he left eighth grade at Saint Mary’s in Dolton for a high school seminary in Holland, Michigan.
His mother sang in the parish choir and worked as a librarian at Mendel Catholic; his father ran a Catholic grammar school. That fourteen-year-old child spent fifty-six of the next seventy years inside the formation house of an order that traces itself to a fifth-century African bishop who summed up the entire Christian life in two words: in illo uno unum.
In the One, we are one. That is now Pope Leo XIV’s motto, stitched into his coat of arms.
I think McCarthy’s bank teller story tells us something the contemporary American imagination has nearly lost the capacity to receive.
God genuinely hides in ordinary lives. The same man entrusted with the votes of 133 cardinals and the spiritual care of 1.4 billion human beings is, in his own banker’s eyes, a customer who will not come down to the branch.
4500 miles from the Vatican, in a city called Washington, the prevailing theory of authority runs the other direction — proven through spectacle, coins, military parades, televised humiliations. Had Pope Leo’s voice carried that pitch, the teller would have bent the rules instantly.
She did not, because he sounded like every other man named Bob. That is the entire scandal of the Incarnation, and it is the whole reason a conclave warned for years never to elect an American chose the American Augustinian on the third ballot.
This Friday marks the first anniversary of his pontificate. McCarthy reminded the parish that on the second day of his papacy, before the world had finished shouting Habemus Papam, Leo slipped out of Rome unannounced and drove to Genazzano to entrust himself to the Mother of Good Counsel — the small Marian shrine of the Augustinians, the patroness of his Chicago province.
He spent the third day at the Augustinian Curia, the order's Rome headquarters, with his brothers — and to this day eats dinner four or five nights a week with the Augustinian community inside the Apostolic Palace, sometimes in shirtsleeves, sometimes in just a shirt and pants, the way the rest of the community dresses.
That is the man we got — a canon lawyer who replies to emails signing off with a single L. When Cardinal Cupich brought a delegation of Chicago union leaders to Rome last year, the pope accepted from them a framed Illinois driver’s license made out to “Leo XIV.”
His chosen name signals where he intends to stand: he took it from the labor pope of the industrial revolution because Bob Prevost believes the Church must sit at the center of the AI revolution the way Leo XIII sat at the center of the industrial one.
I doubt the bank teller will ever know who she hung up on. With any luck, someone tells her, and she laughs.
And the rest of us, listening from a far worse place than that bank, would do well to hear in that small absurdity the sound of the only kind of pope worth following: a man who refuses to demand recognition, because the only recognition that finally matters is the kind that meets you where you already are.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and people of goodwill of every faith and none — who recognize that the Gospel cannot be branded into a product and that the Chair of Peter is something stranger and quieter than any office on earth.
In an era poisoned by spectacle and synthetic outrage, we remain rooted in a faith that finds God hiding in plain sight — at baptismal fonts and bus stops, inside a closet full of Peeps, on the line with a confused bank teller in South Chicago.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for a pulse, a voice, a witness — and right now, as the loudest forces in our public life confuse cruelty with strength, that hunger has never been more urgent.
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