Robert Prevost, the most Latin of us cardinals

Cardinal Robert Prevost, a sign of Pope Francis’ trust in him, was tapped in early 2023 to lead the Dicastery for Bishops – the mighty Vatican department, which monitors the bishop’s dates in half of the Catholic world. Later this year, the Pope made him a cardinal bishop, one of the highest ranks on the College of Cardinals. But Cardinal Prevost remains a low figure that is rarely visible in the media. He also held back as President of the Papal Commission for Latin America. He spoke little about topics such as migration and is relatively unknown outside of Peru.

Although Cardinal Prevost was born in Chicago as the son of a French father and an Italian mother, he has rooted deep roots in Latin America. Shortly after he had granted a conclusion in canonical law from the papal university of St. Thomas Aquin in Rome, he arrived in the remote Andean region of Chulucana in North Peru in 1984.

After returning to Chicago in 1988, he moved to Trujillo, Peru’s third largest city to monitor religious education. A decade later he became the province of the Augustinians in the American middle west. In 2001 he was elected Prior General of the Order in Rome, a post that he held until 2013.

With Peru’s Catholic hierarchy in scandal, Francis again appointed himself in North Peru, the Bishop of Chiclayo, and decided to be an outsider to restore credibility. Almost a decade later, what many saw as a surprise movement, the Pope called him back to Rome to follow Cardinal Marc Ouellet as a prefect of the Dicastery for bishops.

A bridge between factions

Cardinal Prevost has seen the multicultural church that Francis used first -hand, but he is clearly about the challenges. “The maintenance of unity in diversity is a real challenge,” he said in an interview published by the Augustinians. “Especially when polarization has become the standard mode of a society that, instead of looking for unity as a basic principle, swings from one extreme to the other.”

He warned against confusing the unit with uniformity or describing the diversity as free of standards or order.

During his time in the Vatican, Prevost avoided the ideological battles that Flammed from Francis’ pontificate in recent years. He played a calm but conciliatory role in German bishops about the split synodal path – an initiative that was exposed to strong resistance in the Roman Curia.

Prevost was praised for his ability to listen and synthesize, and is increasingly seen as a bridge between polarized camps within the church.