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On Sunday night, Italia 1 gave twenty minutes of its news magazine Studio Aperto Mag to Pope Leo XIV’s hometown of Chicago, and most of those minutes belonged to John Prevost, who sat in the pews of an Augustinian parish near his home and talked about his little brother, the pope.
Near the end, the crew asked him what makes him proudest of Robert.
“That he hasn’t collapsed yet,” he said. “He’s holding on, he’s managing, he’s facing the situation.”
I watched the whole segment, transcribed the Italian voiceover, and put English subtitles on the three passages that matter the most and the entire segment, which you can play below.
The dub runs over John’s voice rather than replacing it, so in a few places his own English survives underneath.
The question the interviewer asked John deserves a second look, because it was not “how is he doing.”
It was “what makes you proudest,” and the first thing that came to a retired school principal’s mind was that his brother has not broken.
Sixteen months into the pontificate, that indeed is a feat for the busiest man in the world.
Consider what those sixteen months have held.
In April, the president of the United States mocked the pope and said that Leo would not be in the Vatican if Trump were not in the White House, and within days a bomb threat arrived at John’s house in suburban Chicago.
Louis, the oldest brother, has spent much of the year defending the MAGA movement that keeps attacking Leo XIV, and John, asked about it in June, said, “Families fight. But family is forever.”
On Sunday he put the same fact more plainly: the three of them talk nearly every day, and “we certainly still fight today.”
When the crew asked whether the pope still finds time for his brother, John told them about a password incident.
He had bought a new computer and did not know that three wrong passwords lock you out.
One day in, the machine was back at the store. When it came home, he propped his iPad on top of it and, on a call with the bishop of Rome, said, “Tell me what I have to do now.”
Some way the pope could help, John explained, “because I’m computer illiterate.”
When April 15 came around, he called again to help him file his taxes.
“He has a very broad range of knowledge,” John said of a man who holds three degrees and spent this year writing Magnifica Humanitas.
Then the segment went to Dolton.
The Prevosts moved into a red brick house by the railroad tracks in 1949, six years before Robert was born, and the house had no room for a crib, so his went in the dining room. The family said the rosary at the table there every evening.
Every September 14, John said, Robert blew out his candles in that same room, and the crew found a photograph of what may be his ninth birthday, in 1964, with Mildred cutting the cake. The Village of Dolton owns the house now and means to make it a museum.
The interviewer asked what their mother would make of all this. Mildred Martínez Prevost was a librarian, and she died in 1990, thirty-five years before the conclave.
“I don’t think she’d go around bragging, ‘Oh, my son is the pope,’” John said. “But I think she’d be very proud, and she’d let him know it, and she’d tell him he’s in her prayers.” Then he thought about it a moment longer. “Maybe she’d also tell him not to get the white cassock dirty. Oh, maybe when he’s at the table she’d put a bib on him.”
That is the formation, right there. The woman who raised the first American pope would have answered the white cassock with a prayer and a bib, because in that house a son’s dignity was never something Rome got to confer. The Church calls the office the servant of the servants of God (a title popes have carried since Gregory the Great), and Mildred had the concept down decades before her boy inherited it.
When Robert was five, an elderly neighbor keeping an eye on the kids outside told him he would be the first American pope. “It happened 65 years ago,” John said. “Who could have imagined it?”
In July he had ten days with his brother at Castel Gandolfo. The brothers swam and read on deck chairs while Leo played tennis with the young people around the villa; they ate every meal at the same table.
Days earlier in the same gardens, Leo had celebrated Mass and eaten lunch with two hundred of Rome’s poorest residents.
John’s account of the papal apartment, when Leo walked him through it, was the account of a man being shown a condo: “He showed us where he lives in the Vatican.”
You can watch the full translated segment below. It runs all twenty minutes, subtitled end to end.
He turns seventy-one with a president attacking him by name and a Silicon Valley reading his encyclical as a personal insult.
Cardinal Cupich, in the same segment, remembers the cardinal beside him in the Sistine Chapel turning as the count came in: “Now you’re the pope’s bishop.”
John remembers his brother trying to reach him by video call the next morning and getting no answer, and calling back a few minutes later to find the new pope on the other end.
There is no chart for a pontificate.
There is a brother in a church pew saying, in English, that the man has not broken yet, and then listing what sits on the desk: “the world’s problems, with wars breaking out,” and people asking whether the pope might talk to so-and-so on their behalf.
The segment notes that Leo has said he hopes to return to the United States as pope within the next two years, though nothing is settled.
Until then, do what Mildred would do. Tell him he is in your prayers, and then put him there.
John and Louis Prevost have both been willing to talk during this pontificate, and Letters from Leo has covered the brothers’ interviews since the beginning:
Aug. 16, 2025 — John Prevost to NBC Chicago: Pope Leo loves John Grisham, plays Wordle daily, and eats Peeps on Halloween
Oct. 15, 2025 — Pope Leo’s brothers: a MAGA Florida man, a Chicago liberal, and the vicar of Christ
Nov. 1, 2025 — Louis Prevost breaks his silence: “He corrects me when I’m wrong”
Jan. 8, 2026 — Louis Prevost on Piers Morgan Uncensored: “I confessed everything short of murder”
April 16, 2026 — After Trump’s attack on Pope Leo, a bomb threat came for John Prevost in suburban Chicago
May 6, 2026 — John Prevost and the bank teller who hung up on Robert Prevost
June 10, 2026 — John Prevost across EWTN, La Croix, NBC Chicago, and CNN: “Families fight. But family is forever.”
June 15, 2026 — “John, I’m the pope”: viral Nikes, car talk, and the pope’s tech-repair work for his brother
Sept. 4, 2026 — Louis Prevost tells Piers Morgan the pope will take Trump’s call: “He has to call me”
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Prevosts of Dolton and with every family that keeps its hands open in a country teaching people to close them.
A librarian and a school principal raised three sons in a house by the tracks, and one of them now carries the weight of the universal Church while a president mocks him and a threat arrives at his brother’s door.
That is what human dignity costs when it is real. It is not an idea to be admired from a distance; it is a bill that comes due in the lives of ordinary people who decide to keep faith anyway.
We are the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because millions of people are hungry for a Church that still believes the migrant and the mocked are worth defending, and because they are tired of being told that cruelty is strength.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an authoritarianism that treats families as targets — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
He’s a hero to Catholic sysadmins everywhere
Pope Leo is such a good person....and it is obvious he has been so his entire life. How lucky we are!