Moore: On May 8, 2025, Robert Prevost became the first American pope in history. For the next year, Scott Detrow, host of NPR's "All Things Considered," and Daniel Burke, senior editor of religion and spirituality, worked together to write a comprehensive biography of Pope Leo XIV. The book is called "American Pope," and it's out today. Detrow says they worked terrified through the entire process.
Detrow: So I think we got there. Daniel said at one point, "Listen, between the two of us, we can do two years' worth of reporting in one year." And that's how we thought about this and that's how we went about it.
We divided up chunks of his life that Daniel would dig into or that I would dig into, or when it came to Peru, it's this formative two decades of his life. And we said we both got to tackle that together. We talked to as many people as we could. We did a lot of archival research. We traveled and around January, we said, "OK, we've got enough to start writing."
And we wrote and we wrote and rewrote. And as we wrote, kind of more reporting would come up and there were facts that we were finding in the very last week before we finalized the manuscript of saying, "Do we have space to get this one more thing in? I just confirmed this one detail." So it was a rush of an experience. And I think our blood pressures both went up a little bit, but I think we both enjoyed it.
Moore: Daniel, for you?
Burke: Yeah, absolutely. Amen to everything Scott said. And just a profound shout-out to people who maintain the archives in the Catholic Church, because those were a gold mine. We found that Robert Prevost is not a guy who talks about himself very much. Even close friends said that he just didn't tell that many stories.
So what we found, however, was he's a member of this organization called the Order of St. Augustine, and he's been a member of this organization basically since he was 14 years old. And what they did was send newsletters about what everyone in the organization was doing around the world every month. And so we would sometimes find first-person accounts of what Robert Prevost was doing in Peru in 1987.
Detrow: And thinking, because he wrote it himself.
Burke: That's right. It was amazing. And so with those in hand, we could then go back to people and say, "OK, what do you remember about this? What do you remember about that?" But it was the archivists who led us into these rooms where this wealth of material about Robert Prevost was. And we were profoundly in debt to them.
Moore: You quote a Peruvian Jesuit cardinal who describes the differences between Pope Francis and Pope Leo, says Francis was a bulldozer and Leo is a leveler.
Detrow: When Cardinal Barreto said that, I thought, "That's a key point of the book right there." And because it crystallized what we had been thinking and seeing. And I think it crystallized why Pope Leo was elected at the conclave, because Pope Francis really took him under his wing, really taught him about the politics of the global church, really in a way that wasn't clear at the time, it was clear in retrospect, was teaching him how to be pope and really pointed to him in a lot of subtle ways to say, "This is who I want to succeed me."
But also a lot of conservative cardinals, a lot of cardinals who had big differences with Pope Francis, ended up supporting Robert Prevost in the conclave as well, because they saw his management style. They saw how thoughtful he was. They saw how he thinks in five- and 10-year windows, not just the spur-of-the-moment next decision.
They wanted somebody who could be a leveler, who could say, "This is the path forward, and I'm going to take my time doing what I need to be done because I'm thinking about the church 20, 30, 40 years down the line." That's the kind of forward thinker he is. And I think that was appeal for a lot of the people who were deciding who would be in charge of the church next.
Moore: And Daniel, for you, can you have a Pope Leo without Pope Francis being the predecessor?
Burke: I don't think so. And I also think that Pope Francis' funeral, which was nine days before the conclave that elected Pope Leo, I think it had a profound effect on Catholic leaders in Rome. To see so many people turn out in Rome to celebrate the life of Pope Francis made a deep impression on the cardinals, who would then vote to elect his successor.
And we talk about all the ways in which Pope Francis kind of elevated Robert Prevost throughout the church. And those are small ways, like meetings that they would have together. It was kind of like pope school. This is how you run an extraordinarily complex organization. But also, he elevated him in formal ways, like making him the highest rank of cardinals within the College of Cardinals.
There was a moment when his Augustinian brothers went to Rome and saw him, as the first time they'd seen him maybe in a decade, and they said, "Oh, this guy is now one of the guys." He had been elevated so much by Francis that even they were surprised.
Detrow: They were talking to each other at lunch that day, saying, "Can you believe Bob? Bob could be pope? Oh my gosh, Bob could be pope."
And that's how they thought about it. And it hadn't struck till then, until they see their old friend standing there on a platform right next to Pope Francis, clearly having a good time.
Burke: Shoulder to shoulder, they're laughing and they're talking. They had a really sympathetic relationship with each other.
Moore: There seems to be some parallels between America getting its first Catholic president and Catholicism getting its first American pope that you kind of lay out here as well.
Detrow: Yeah. Robert Prevost is a kid in school, second or third grade, during the 1960 presidential election. And we were talking about the archives. To me, one of the most eye-opening things was, I'm a Catholic. I've covered politics for decades. I love politics. I love the 1960 presidential election, especially as a period of time.
But I was going through the church bulletins reading week by week the way that the pastors would write about this election unfolding, or the way that these syndicated columns would be written for the people in the pews. And a lot of Catholics in the country were really anxious about this election. They felt persecuted. They felt that they were a religious minority, even if Chicago, they weren't. They were the majority of the city.
But it was a mindset, and there was a real fear that the country would once again reject a Catholic president. And you see the ways that they're kind of preemptively explaining away how Kennedy could lose. And it's funny because the churches were trying to be nonpolitical. They never said Kennedy, but they talked about a Catholic candidate.
And it was interesting to read that. And then for him to win. And that made it even more emotional when you see the way that the school and the church responds to his assassination. Pope Leo's brother John told me about remembering watching the funeral with their mother, Mildred, and the three boys sitting there watching on the small TV in their living room. And she was just sobbing the whole time, as so many Catholics around the country were.
Moore: Of course, Pope Leo is known as the first American pope, but it sounds like time outside of the States really helped to shape much of his work.
Burke: That's right. So in interviews, he has said that the most important part of his ministry, of his time as a priest, was in Peru, and he was there three different times, more or less 20 years overall. And he goes there as a young priest, and he is learning a different way, actually, of being church.
It was very top-down, the Catholic Church at the time. But in Peru, they wanted to build it from the bottom up. And what that meant was splitting the normal idea of the parish and church and decentralizing it and creating these little base communities where people would get together and read the Bible and bring meals to each other. And it was just a way to be more of a kind of a grassroots church. Rather than waiting for what the bishop or the priest will tell you to do, the people would kind of take it upon themselves.
And what's so fascinating is he takes this model, he really embraces it, and he brings that to other stops in Peru, other stops in the United States. And he's started to take steps to bring that to Rome as leader of the Catholic Church. So it's fascinating to see this germ of an idea in 1985 in Peru becomes a new way of being the Catholic Church in 2026.
Moore: Finally here, Scott, you've written and talked publicly about your own Catholic faith. What did you learn from researching and writing this book that may have challenged your faith?
Detrow: As the dad of two little kids and as the host of a radio show where my job description is to consider lots of things at once, I think sometimes I have a really hard time focusing and being fully present. And I was just struck by the interviews we did with his close friends and people who lived with him, seeing the way that he approaches his prayer life and even beyond prayer, just how he tries to center himself and be present in the moment.
He wakes up really early each day and spends several hours by himself, just in thought, in meditation and prayer and reading. And I read a lot of the text that kind of inspired Pope Leo's approach to prayer. And I got a lot out of that.
And I think maybe because also I was waking up at 5 in the morning to write this book over the past two years, but I really kind of tried to bring a little bit of that to my daily life of how can I just sit quietly with myself and not look at my phone and not send an email and not send a text message? Daniel can tell you I struggled with that at times.
Burke: But I kind of took the opposite response a little bit away because I could be not as responsive on texts and WhatsApp as I should be. And the pope was always responsive to the priests that were, even when he was a high-ranking cardinal, he would answer people on their birthday. So I've actually tried to be better as a result of writing this book with responding to people as they text and whatnot.
Moore: Well, that's the beauty of faith, right? Is we can look at the same thing and get different perspectives out of it. And I think that's a wonderful part about this. Scott Detrow and Daniel Burke are the authors of "American Pope." Scott, Daniel, thank you so much for this work. Thank you so much for this book and congratulations.
Detrow: Thank you, Matthew. Appreciate it.
Burke: Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you.
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