A Man of the Whole Hemisphere
Newsletter for May 9, 2025
The first thing that came to mind when I heard the news of Cardinal Robert Prevost’s election to the papacy yesterday was a statement Thomas Merton made in the preface to the Argentine edition of his Obras Completas (Collected Works):
This, then, is what seems to me so important about America—and the great function of my vocation in it: to know America in its totality, to be a complete American, a man of the whole hemisphere, of the whole New World.
Like many of us, I am still learning the contours of the new pope’s biography, but I recalled from reporting on a press conference for the Synod where he was a featured panelist that he had spent extensive time in Peru. All told, he was in the country for close to two decades, first as an Augustinian missionary in Trujillo in the 1980s and ’90s and later as the Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023. Between these two periods, he returned to his native Chicago to serve in leadership positions within the Augustinian order.
Prior to becoming Bishop of Chiclayo, Prevost became a naturalized Peruvian citizen. This makes the new pope not only first American to hold the office, but the first with dual nationality. His unique background speaks to and embodies a central project of Merton’s final decade: to “help the hemisphere realize its own destiny” by introducing to North America the deep wellspring of wisdom cultivated for hundreds of years in the South. As Malgorzata Poks writes in her stunningly perceptive monograph on Merton and Latin America, A Consonance of Voices:
Ever striving toward a holistic perspective, Merton understands that the North is incomplete without the South, and vice versa; that both continents have something precious to offer to each other; that the “shallow English roots” need the “deeper roots” of the Indian, the Spaniard, the Portuguese and the black for the true America to finally come to maturity and thus fulfill the “Great Vocation of . . . a hemisphere that is called and chosen.”
I am not sure the extent to which Prevost opened himself to what Poks calls “Hispanic America’s sapiential approach to life” that “affirm[s] the primacy of the communal over the individualistic, tradition over progress, wisdom over science” and “privilege[s] the spiritual and contemplative dimension of reality,” but many signs point to the fact that he was well regarded within his adopted country. Per the BBC, he “is fondly remembered as a figure who worked with marginalised communities and helped build bridges”; it has also been reported that he specifically requested to remain in Peru during the contentious protests of 2022–23 to accompany his people.
Such actions show a willingness “to learn from South and Latin America and listen to the voice that has so long been ignored,” a voice “which must awaken to its own significance,” as Merton wrote to Nicaraguan poet-priest and one-time Trappist novice Ernesto Cardenal in 1964. Three months later, Merton wrote again of “the need for admitting to hearing the voice of the new man who is rooted in the American earth (not just in the American machinery), especially the earth of South America.” His dialogues with Cardenal and other Latin American poets helped articulate this notion of a transcultural identity, one in which the two continents encountered within each other a sense of spiritual unity. Prevost’s—now Pope Leo XIV’s—experience of shuttling between them can serve as a sign of Merton’s interior geography:
It seems that I hear in the even more profound silence of Peru the forgotten syllables of ancient wisdom which has never died and which contains in its secrets an image of truth that no man has recognized, an image, symbolic and prophetic, like that of Jesus Christ.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic