As a missionary, parish priest and later on as bishop in northern Peru he ministered to the bad, knocked the excesses of power and lobbied for action on environment modification.
“I love Peru very much, the Peruvian people, that is part of who I am,” the US-born pontiff informed his biographer Elise Ann Allen in 2015.
Prevost took Peruvian citizenship in 2015. As Pope Leo XIV, he goes back to the nation quickly as part of a three-nation South American trip.
Dad Roberto
Born in Chicago in 1955, Prevost was sent out to Peru as a missionary in 1985 by the Augustinian order, entrusted with changing the village of Chulucanas in poverty-stricken Piura area into a Catholic diocese.
“His approach to poverty would have been different without knowing Peru and getting his hands dirty, because it’s not the same in the United States,” theologian Veronique Lecaros, author of a book about the pope’s time in Peru, stated.
In Chulucanas, citizens invited him warmly and Hispanicised his name, calling him Father Roberto.
2 months after showing up, he contracted typhoid fever and was hospitalised for the very first time in his life, as he stated to Allen.
In 1986, he went back to the United States, where he organized occupations and objectives for the Augustinians.
No ‘common gringo’
He returned to Peru in 1988 to settle in the northwestern city of Trujillo, for what would be his longest remain in the nation, till 1999.
As head of an Augustinian seminary he was concurrently remarkable, instructor, parish priest and ecclesiastical judge.
Peru in the 1990s was shaken by violence, as the state waged war versus harsh Maoist Shining Path insurgents.
The Shining Path killed 3 foreign priests– 2 Poles and an Italian– in August 1991 in the northern area of Ancash.
The Augustinian order recommended foreign friars leave Peru and provided Prevost a bodyguard, which he decreased.
“I don’t look like the typical gringo. I’m a little bit darker” in skin, he is priced estimate as stating in Allen’s bio.
“I think it’s very important to stay at the sides of the people we’re serving and to be with them. And that’s what we did,” he included.
Learning floodwaters
In 1999, he went back to the United States as head of the Augustinians in Chicago.
His long-lasting love affair with Peru, especially its dry north, continued.
After a 15-year hiatus, he was back in 2014, this time as a bishop designated by Pope Francis to administer the diocese of Chiclayo.
In among his very first function as bishop he took part in a beatification mass for the 3 priests killed in 1991.
Prevost was an enthusiastic ambassador of Francis’s encyclical Laudato Siwhich concentrates on looking after the world as “our common home”
He likewise looked for to recover the injuries of Peru’s past, advising previous president Alberto Fujimori, who was attempted and put behind bars for gross human rights infractions by the security forces, to “personally apologise” to the victims.
As his objective was waning, Prevost likewise protected the right to demonstration throughout lethal anti-government presentations and took a trip to an area struck by flooding to promote for the victims, standing ankle-deep in water.
In April 2023, he transferred to Rome as head of the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican body accountable for pre-selecting bishops.
2 years later on, in his very first speech as pope from the veranda of St Peter’s Basilica, he provided an unique reference to Peru and his “beloved diocese of Chiclayo”
AFP
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