Welcome to today’s one-minute Vatican briefing. On May 11, cardinals returned exhausted and hungry from their first vote in the Sistine Chapel. Over a simple dinner at Casa Santa Marta, they weighed three front-runners: Pietro Parolin, Peter Erdő and a surprise American, Robert Francis Prevost. Born in Chicago, a former missionary in Peru and fluent in Spanish and Italian, Prevost quietly checked all the boxes. He listened more than he spoke and avoided “any obvious politicking or machinations,” cardinals later recalled.

By the fourth ballot, momentum swung decisively to Prevost. As one cardinal joked, “Oh my goodness, I’m not going to use my five days’ worth of clothes,” once he saw the tide turning. When the count hit the two-thirds majority, the chapel erupted in applause. “He remained seated! Somebody had to pull him up. We were all teary-eyed,” a cardinal said.

And so Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, greeting the world from St. Peter’s balcony as a swift and stunning consensus made him the unexpected leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
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