(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – There is a lot to know about Pope Leo XIV, born in Chicago as Robert Prevost.
“I found his transparency to be incredibly refreshing and uncommon,” author Elise Ann Allen told an audience at Southern Illinois University‘s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. “He doesn’t, I don’t think, have immediate opinions about things, and so in that sense he is the least ideological person I’ve ever met. He doesn’t jump to one side or this side because he’s thinking according to this frame or that frame.”
After some years in Rome, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Prevost found himself in another culture shock – Peru.
“He came from this stable and loving (family) environment,” said Allen, “arrives to the northern plains of Peru in 1985, and there is nothing. Utter poverty in those decades. You have terrorism, there is a huge economic crisis, there is social instability. he is living in the middle of nowhere with nothing, experiencing for the first time what real poverty is.”
Allen, a Vatican-based journalist, says said this pope is overcoming generational barriers.
“Doing the ‘six-seven’ gesture with young people – I don’t even know what that is, and I don’t know that he even knows what that is, but he understands that it’s a thing,” said Allen. “He wants to connect with people, and he seeks those points of connection.”
