Pope Leo XIV’s College Years Included a Laxative Prank — and the Vatican Put It on Film
An Augustinian friar recounts the practical jokes of the international college in “Leone a Roma,” and the editors cut to a photo of young Bob Prevost grinning. Five more revelations follow, from China to the conclave.
Today’s essay takes you inside Leone a Roma, the Vatican’s new documentary on Pope Leo XIV’s Roman years — with timestamps for every revelation. The first, starring a booby-trapped alarm clock and a laxative disguised as candy, is free for everyone.
The other five, from a quiet walk through China’s churches to the crash in the Andes, belong to the paid members who sustain this community.
On July 1, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication premiered Leone a Roma — “Leo in Rome” — a 55-minute documentary retracing the years Robert Francis Prevost spent in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a deacon-student in 1981 to the Dicastery for Bishops.
Vatican journalists Felipe Herrera-Espaliat, Salvatore Cernuzio, and Tiziana Campisi built the film from archival footage and the voices of people who knew him long before the white cassock: Augustinian friars from the Curia where he governed the order, cloistered nuns in Montefalco and Cascia, the families of Cesano and Genazzano, and officials of the Dicastery for Bishops.
I was invited to the premiere at the Vatican earlier this month, and the film charmed me from its opening frames. So did the craft of the team behind it — including Cernuzio, whose reporting in Padre, his book on the fatherhood of Pope Francis, I wrote about in April. The film is in Italian with English subtitles, and you can watch it in full on YouTube.
Reading the film alongside everything Letters from Leo has published on the pope’s life over the past year, I found six moments that revealed something I did not know — along with new images of our pope that the world had simply never seen. Each moment below carries its timestamp, so you can find it yourself and watch these witnesses speak in their own words.
Consider this a first dispatch. Later this summer I will publish a broader look at the Vatican’s full trilogy on the pope — León de Perú, Leo from Chicago, and now Leone a Roma — three films that together give us more of Robert Prevost than any biography yet written.
1. The pranks of his student Rome: a booby-trapped alarm clock and a laxative disguised as candy [13:13 – 15:15]
The film’s most disarming stretch belongs to an Augustinian friar from Prevost’s student years, who lights up describing life at the international college. “The wonderful thing was that, besides study and prayer, we also had times of recreation,” he says — recitals and evenings of entertainment that took real work to prepare. “That time was essential for building these bonds of fraternity.”
Then come the practical jokes. “They played so many on me — so many, yes,” he admits. One night he went to bed and heard a drone he took for an airplane outside his window; the brothers had hidden a ringing alarm clock on top of his wardrobe.
“They said to me, ‘Here, I would like to offer you a candy.’ So I thought it was a candy, but instead it was a laxative tablet. As a result, while I was in the chapel I had to run to the bathroom.”
That one came at a gathering with the Jesuits, of all people. And as the friar tells it, the editors cut to a photograph of a young Bob Prevost grinning ear to ear [14:50] — the film’s wordless verdict on where the mischief lived. We have met the pope of encyclicals and diplomacy. This is the world that formed him: young religious who studied until dawn, prayed together, and hid alarm clocks on top of one another’s wardrobes.
