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Pope Leo XIV welcomed about 7,000 Villanova and Notre Dame fans, players and coaches to the Paul VI Audience Hall on Saturday morning, one day before the two Catholic schools open the college basketball season in Rome.
He started reading his remarks in Italian, caught the mistake, and switched to English. Then he set the text aside.
“Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, we oftentimes heard, ‘Go Irish!’” Leo told the crowd. “But, as you all know, Prevost graduated from Villanova.”
The Villanova section roared. Leo waited them out, then finished the bit: “So the pope doesn’t take sides. Prevost has another opinion, but we won’t do that now.”
Two names, one man
The joke landed because Leo split himself in two, and everyone in the hall understood which half was talking.
Robert Prevost earned a math degree from Villanova in 1977 and used to catch Wildcats games at the Palestra, according to Villanova’s longtime team chaplain, the Rev. Rob Hagan, who calls him “a true, blue Villanovan.”
Pope Leo XIV belongs to South Bend as much as he belongs to the Main Line.
He has been living with that split for nearly 18 months. In May, his friend Father Tom McCarthy told a parish outside Chicago about the bank teller who hung up on him after he asked, over the phone, whether it would matter that he was Pope Leo. His brother John, a retired Catholic school principal, still plays Wordle with him every morning.
Prevost’s opinion had already slipped out once this fall.
Asked about the games on the papal plane during his September trip to France, Leo said, “They tell me that the people coming to the match, 90% are Villanova and 10% Notre Dame, so the voice of the people of God will be very strong on the Villanova side.”
An organizer of the event later told reporters the split would be nowhere near nine to one.
Notre Dame came ready anyway. The Rev. Robert Dowd, the university’s president, conceded the Wildcats had an edge and predicted that Leo would “be a bridge builder when we play each other.”
His players handed the pope a jersey, a golden basketball and a banner reading “Pope Leo, Play like a champion today,” a riff on the famous sign above the stairwell to the Notre Dame Stadium field.
Leo stepped up onto the dais where his chair sits to gain a few inches on the Irish before posing for the photo. Then he flashed the Villanova “V” as chants of “Let’s go ’Nova” filled the hall.
At one point he took the golden ball, bounced it, caught it, and bounced it again (a double dribble that would have drawn a whistle at the Palestra).
“Certainly not enemies”
When Leo returned to his prepared text, the jokes gave way to a moral argument. Sport, he said, can bring people together and teach “the values of cooperation and mutual sharing,” which he called “increasingly necessary in an age marked by the distance that can be created by technology.”
He described it as “a medicine for both body and spirit when it is practiced well.”
“During sporting events, there is a natural desire to cheer, often passionately for one’s own side,” he said. “It is important to remember that in any competition, the members of two teams, even when they have a competitive rivalry, are certainly not enemies.”
A ballot from Robert Prevost
Leo was talking about basketball on Saturday. The line he drew between Robert Prevost and Pope Leo XIV, though, is one he has been drawing for more than a year, and it has become one of the most revealing habits of this pontificate.
He drew it for Elise Ann Allen in July 2025, in the first interview he gave as pope, which appears in her biography Pope Leo XIV. Asked whom he would cheer for if the United States played Peru in the World Cup, Leo recalled telling people that Robert Prevost was a White Sox fan, “but as pope, I’m a fan of all the teams.”
In the same conversation he called the role of pope new to him and said the newest part of the job was finding himself treated as a world leader.
Last December, on the papal plane, he told reporters that a German journalist had asked him to name one book, besides Augustine, that would explain “who Prevost is.”
Even his first book, Freedom Under Grace, carries the byline “Robert F. Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV.”
On Friday, the line moved from a figure of speech to a ballot. The Holy See Press Office confirmed that Leo had mailed his ballot in Illinois’s midterm elections, saying he “has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen, whenever he was eligible to do so.”
He is registered under his baptismal name in New Lenox, where his brother John lives, and historians told CNN he is likely the first pope ever to vote in a secular democratic election.
On CNN This Morning on Friday, I said Leo would argue “that Pope Leo XIV is not participating in this election, that Robert Prevost is participating in this election,” and I pointed to the same World Cup answer he gave Allen.
The Vatican’s own statement grounded the vote in his citizenship rather than his office (a distinction worth noticing), and on Saturday Leo told 7,000 basketball fans that the pope doesn’t take sides.
Some of the pope’s natural allies are uneasy anyway. The church historian Massimo Faggioli, who has written an amazing book on this pontificate, said on social media that it “was not a good thing” for the world to learn the pope had voted.
(After the election, once things slow down a little, I plan to review Faggioli’s Leo XIV and the Global Church: Unity and Peace, and I’ll probably pair it with a reader offer like the ones I made for Christopher Lamb’s American Hope, Elise Ann Allen’s Pope Leo XIV: The Biography and Leo’s own Freedom Under Grace. The offers on those three books are open again through Sunday at 11:59 PM PST.)
Others worry that any papal ballot will be claimed by whichever party wins. It is a fair concern, because a man can divide his name in two while most of the world sees only one of them.
On Thursday, I wrote about why Leo wants every Catholic to vote. Saturday supplied the other half of that teaching: a Catholic can vote with conviction, the way Prevost roots for Villanova, and still refuse to treat the other side as an enemy.
Bergoglio, Ratzinger and Prevost
Leo’s two predecessors answered the same question in very different ways. When Antonio Spadaro opened his landmark 2013 interview by asking, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” Francis answered for the man and the pope at once.
He told Elisabetta Piqué the next year that he was still the same Padre Jorge, and in 2019 he told Jesuits in Mozambique that his experience of God had not fundamentally changed, only that God now gave him “the grace I need for the present time.”
For Francis, the office brought new grace to an old self.
Benedict XVI went the other way.
At his final general audience in February 2013, he said that a man who accepts the Petrine ministry belongs to the whole Church and that the private dimension of his life is “completely eliminated.”
He kept his papal name in retirement rather than reverting to Joseph Ratzinger, and he died on New Year’s Eve 2022 as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
His one exception shows how seriously he took the rule.
When he published Jesus of Nazareth in 2007, he signed the preface with both names. The book, he wrote, was “in no way an exercise of the magisterium,” so every reader was free to contradict him.
Leo has found a third path, something closer to a working partnership between his two names. Robert Prevost keeps his Illinois voter registration, a byline and a soft spot for the Wildcats, while the pope answers to 1.4 billion Catholics, Fighting Irish fans among them.
Anyone who thinks the papacy is frozen in place hasn’t been paying attention.
Since 2013, a pope has resigned for the first time in nearly 600 years, and his successor turned down the Apostolic Palace and took a name no pope had ever used. On Friday, the Vatican confirmed that an American pope, still recovering from lung surgery, had mailed his ballot home to Illinois.
The office keeps changing because the men who hold it keep asking what it is for. That should challenge us, and we should be open to the challenge.
“No one is born a saint”
The pope closed with Pier Giorgio Frassati, the mountain-climbing Italian layman he canonized alongside Carlo Acutis in September 2025, and whom he called a patron saint of athletes.
Frassati’s life, Leo said, “reminds us that no one is born a champion, just as no one is born a saint. Rather, holiness requires a daily training in love.”
He told the pilgrims that their true goal, “beyond emerging victorious in any one event, is to win the prize of everlasting life.”
Sunday’s tip-off at the Palazzo dello Sport falls on All Saints’ Day. It also comes 18 days after surgeons removed the lower lobe of Leo’s right lung, an operation after which, as I reported last week, his doctors said he needs no further cancer treatment.
A man who spent part of October in a hospital bed spent Saturday morning trading jokes and blessings with 7,000 basketball fans, and he looked like he enjoyed every minute of it.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and every Catholic, Wildcat or Fighting Irish, who believes a rival can still be a brother or a sister.
The habits Leo described on Saturday (cheer with everything you have, then shake hands when the buzzer sounds) are the same habits our politics has forgotten. We remember them because the Gospel asks us to love our enemies, and Leo reminded us that most of the people we call enemies were never enemies in the first place.
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L🧡VE Pope Leo…and Robert Prevost!
I love them both he’s wonderful man everybody loves him God bless him and keep him safe on his travels