“The truth is that, by imprinting a rapid turning point and ascent to the ecclesiastical career of Prevost, Pope Francis has chosen his successor”. Someone around San Pietro lets himself go to a comment outside the teeth. And then, in the face of questions and perplexities, he invites to concern the stages of a path that began twelve years and two months ago, when Jorge Bergoglio was elected in March 2013.

Who is Robert Francis Prevost

Until then, in fact, to find out who Robert Francis Prevost was, it was necessary to be a profound connoisseurs of the world of Augustinian missionaries: an American priest with a nice international curriculum, but without mitria or ring. Always on the outskirts of the Empire, at least according to the Vatican geography: the native Illinois, the seminary studies, a passage to Rome to learn at the highest levels canonical law and the Italian, and then a lot of Peru, as a missionary and trainer of young aspiring priests. He was not even Bishop, the head of the Augustinians, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis. A completely different career from that of the other papabili, and of the most papable of all, that Pietro Parolin who was created Cardinal by Bergoglio at the beginning of the pontificate, in 2014, and which however worked at the Vatican at the highest levels since much earlier, that is, since 47 -year -old entered the state secretariat at the behest of Karol Wojtyla. Just in the year in which he creates a long -course curiale like Parolin, Bergoglio appoints Prevost Bishop of Chiclayo, in Peru. From there on, the stages follow one another with an increasingly tight rhythm. In 2020 he joined the congregation for the bishops, a key assignment in the management of the universal Church. But it is 2023 the year of the definitive qualitative leap: Francesco in January chooses him as a prefect of that dicastery, that is, as responsible for bishops from all over the world, just he who was still not even bishop ten years before, and he creates him cardinal. By definition, voter of the next Pope and Papable in turn. A very rapid climb, made possible by the attention of the Pope for figures far away by traditional Vatican apparatuses and close to the suburbs of the world and the Church.

Its imprint

The Bergoglian imprint in this rise, up to the papal throne, is therefore quite clear. Those who want to separate Leo XIV and his election from Francesco does not deal with the belief, which turns among the Bergogliani of strict observance, that Robert Francis Prevost was considered by Jorge the cardinal closest to him, also from a human point of view, among the papabili. We would even venture the use of the category of friendship, if we were sure that it is also known to the Holy Spirit. Of course, the choice of the name recalls the pope of the Rerum novarumbut also refers to that friar lion who, despite being combined with the saint of Assisi in the “second hour”, was the most intimate partner, his brother and confessor, in the final phase of life and until death. To confirm the continuity – as far as you understand while in the conclave rooms there is still the smell of the burned cards to become white smoke, and knowing well that the truths of those very special elections are discovered after years, if ever – there are the dynamics of alliance and vote as they manifested themselves in the two fast days in which the cardinals were inand “the whole world outside” to wait. Parolin entered Pope and Cardinal came out, we read. However, it is read on the same pages that gave him by probable Pope before and during, regardless of the ancient saying.

The votes of the conservatives

Still, the canvas that was to become the sail of Leone XIV boat had been cooking for a while. A solid sail, which had the master tree built along the axis of life, work and mission of Robert Prevost, being able to count on the team sense of almost all the cardinals of the north and south of the American continent. An already important block of votes, which would have brought the vote of the Italian Bergogliani very quickly, and of many cardinals of diocese. With Parolin, Pope entered, few sure votes would soon remain, mainly those of Roman Curia: too few not only to be elected, but also, probably, to be decisive in the count. So much so that – again for what it is worth, so little distance from the Conclave – around San Pietro more than someone is convinced that the votes of the conservatives then ended up in Hungarian Peter Endo, also the son of another time of the Church, and created cardinal just fifty years old even by John Paul II.

“When the conclave began, looking at it with the eyes of the next, the game was practically closed, Leo XIV and its election were in the facts of history and the Holy Spirit”. Yeah, with the eyes of the next. With those of the first, being a fly that knew in which windows to enter the parts of San Calisto, river meetings would have been given between cardinals of the two Americas and the addition of some European Bergogliano of strict observance, and the participation, defined as “important” for the purposes of the election, of the Argentine theologian Emilce Cuda – desired by Bergoglio in the key role of secretary for the pontifical commission of the Latin America. Just the role of Cuda brings back a few years in the prevost career. In a decisive phase to understand his ascent, and the trust granted to him by Bergoglio and by the whole South American progressive Church. Yes, because “his” Peru, what has first become the country of mission and then of election, so much so that it becomes a citizen, is one of the central of Catholicism ultra -care, indeed openly reactionary, who lived the Papacy of Bergoglio as a good reason as his enemy. Peruvian were the roots of Sodalicio De Vida Cristianafounded by the theologian of Lima Leonardo Figari in 1971 and approved by John Paul II. The Sodalic It was dissolved APENA before the death of Pope Bergoglio, one of his latest acts, which we told you on these pages and of which today perhaps the weight is better understood. Peruvians several exponents of a church that has hurt so much to innocent children and given scandal, such as Cardinal Cipriani, a powerful purple of Opus Dei, punished by Bergoglio

His Peru

It is in this Peru, “his” Peru, who prevost first receives the trust of Pope Francis and then evidently convinces him that he was well placed, since he operates at the highest ecclesial leaders from 2014 to 2023, before being called in Rome, to take responsibility for the management of bishops all over the world or, if you prefer, to make the lion of the elderly Francesco who saw the sunset of life and his earthly mission. Just in the middle of those years Peruvians, even Prevost is lapped by a sexual scandal. Specifically, he is accused of not having acted quite promptly against a priest accused by three sisters of violence. The violence reported to Prevost, which welcomes the complaints, listens to them, has always declared that he has sent them to the competent ecclesial authorities, date back to more than 15 years earlier, and therefore are not considered processible by the civil authorities who receive a complaint, a complaint that precisely Prevost immediately declares to have invited to protrude.

The accusations

The attention of the opinion of public opinion focus on the accused priest: Prevost declared that he had said to the complaints that that was the first accusation aimed at that priest but this did not mean that he did not believe them, and that he proceeded to promptly remove the accused by relegating him to private life, while several testimonies report that the accused continued to officially officiate religious ceremonies, from the place of the complaint. The ecclesiastical process is reopened following controversy and accusations circulated on some Peruvian media, but it should be noted that Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz, two investigative journalists who with their work have unmasked dozens of pedophile priests, and given the process that then led Bergoglio to dissolve the Sodalicargue there is no foundation in the accusations of omission addressed against Prevost. Indeed, Ugaz includes him among the few prelates of the American continent to have always shown attention and diligent in fighting the plague of pedophilia in the Church. In addition, incontrovertible is that suspicions and poisons on the Prevost account have been conveyed by voices and media close to the sodalician, that the accusations return to bounce into the net in view of the conclave that will lead to the election of Leone XIV, and that the canonical lawyer who accompanies the denunciation in front of the ecclesiastical court is Ricardo Coronado Arcescue, hunted in a bad way, Obsessed by Sandinisti and theologians of the Liberation and for this reason very critical of Francesco, former organizer of pilgrimages to Poland in the footsteps of the Pope most loved in that piece of South American Catholicism, and finally reported by the diocese of Lima because he continued to exercise the role of canon lawyer, however, being suspended due to several criminal and ecclesiastical processes on him.

And in short, it is looking at this picture, as a whole, that the constituency of Leone XIV and its election is better understood, and who instead were its opponents, in the Vatican as in South America. The “hot” reconstructions leave the time they find, and for cold ones it will be necessary to wait a few years, perhaps. It seems certain, however, that the Targate Opus Dei, sodalician and Yae resistance were solid. Precisely because they know the opponent’s caliber and solidity, perhaps because they are timed by years of Campali battles in South America, on Prevost, on the other hand, all the votes of the Bergolians of all latitude and trend have rained, without any dispersion, a objective built strategically over time and aimed tactically at the right time. It would almost think of a Leninist action, but we say it in a low voice, before some honest priests who grew up in the forests, the arrows of those who, defeated, sees theologians of liberation from all sides.