It finally feels cool to be a Peruvian American former altar boy who went to Catholic high school and Catholic college.
I knew someday my time would come.
The selection on Thursday of Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, arrived, as my mother put it to me, as a gift from God. Though American-born, the new pope spent years working in my native Peru and even obtained Peruvian citizenship. “An American pope?” my wife asked, incredulous, staring at the television, when Prevost was announced. “A Peruvian pope!” I answered.
The new pope’s status as an American shocked me, and I immediately began to consider the politics and symbolism of the choice. What would this mean for the divides within the American church, for the moral leadership of the United States in the world, for the legacy of Pope Francis? It was my reaction as a journalist, as an observer, peering ahead.
But Leo’s status as a Peruvian made me reach back. I thought of the faithful in Chiclayo, the coastal city in northern Peru where Prevost served as bishop, and the joy his old flock must feel at his ascent. I remembered the American priests, nuns and lay brothers in Lima who educated my sisters and me and, a generation earlier, my mother. I recalled the open-air youth day Mass during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Peru in 1985, when I was 13 years old; it was so hot that day that the authorities sprayed water on us with hoses, as we shouted, “¡Juan Pablo, amigo, el Perú está contigo!” (That’s “John Paul, friend, Peru is with you,” except it’s better when it rhymes.)
These memories were my reaction as a Catholic, as a believer and as an immigrant who made Leo’s journey, though in the opposite direction. I was born in Lima and have spent most of my life in the United States; Leo was born in Chicago and spent much of his life working in Peru. I am a Peruvian who embraced America, and the pope is an American who embraced Peru. It’s a coincidence, nothing more, but seeing the pope on that balcony felt like an odd and unexpected validation for my straddling, my choices, my faith.
John Paul II, the pope of my youth, is my default image for the papacy; not Benedict, not even Francis could displace him. As a kid, I saw John Paul as part pope and part action hero, fighting Communism one day and forgiving his would-be assassin another. It was a point of pride in our family that my great-uncle Alcides Mendoza, who was the youngest bishop at the Second Vatican Council and later became archbishop of Cuzco, helped show John Paul around when he visited Peru. This only cemented the Polish pope’s place in my Vatican cinematic universe.
