The First Augustinian Pope

Augustine on the Lake

In 1885, a man named Dorr Eugene Felt invented one of the earliest calculating machines, called the comptometer. In a way he never could have expected, nearly a century later, the wealth generated by this device would come to serve another man with a mathematical bent: Robert Francis Prevost.

Felt and his wife, Agnes, eventually built a tremendous mansion on land near Lake Michigan outside Holland, Michigan. They completed the project in 1928, but it was hardly used before both Agnes and Dorr died—Agnes only six weeks after moving in, and Dorr about a year and a half later. They left the mansion to their four daughters, who didn’t have much interest in it. Eventually, they sold it to the province of the Augustinian Order.

The Felt Mansion and the beautiful land around it became the home of the St. Augustine Seminary High School, at first a boarding school (day students were admitted later on) for Catholic boys to receive a secondary education while discerning the priesthood in the Augustinian Order. It was here that the future Leo XIV would begin his high school education in 1969, the very year Pope St. Paul VI promulgated the reformed Mass.

At St. Augustine, Leo excelled across the board, including leading the school yearbook to second place in a national contest. Here is the full text of a story that appeared under the headline “Robert Prevost is Commended” in the Holland Evening Sentinel on October 9, 1972:

Robert Prevost, a senior at St. Augustine Seminary High School, has been awarded a Letter of Commendation honoring him for his high performance on the 1971 Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, according to his principal, the Rev. John Peck, OSA.
He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Louis M. Prevost of Dolton, Ill.
Provost [sic] has consistently been on the Honor Roll. His activities and offices include editor in chief of the yearbook, National Honor Society, vice president and past secretary of Student Council, past president of Library Club, Mission Club, senator to the Student Congress in Lansing, and president of the senior class.
He plans to continue his studies with the Order of St. Augustine for the Priesthood. He presently intends to major in mathematics or psychology in college.

It ended up being mathematics. Leo continued his Augustinian formation at Villanova University, named for the Augustinian St. Thomas of Villanova, whose relic is set in Leo’s pectoral cross, outside Philadelphia. While there, the New York Post reports, he and other students founded the university’s first pro-life club, said to be the oldest in the country, in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Leo seems not to have participated in the political and cultural battles that roiled campus, as students protested the Vietnam War and attempted to overturn campus rules they found conservative and restrictive. Though the Philadelphia Inquirer does report that Leo had a lighter side: He showed up to a 1976 Halloween party dressed as Groucho Marx.

Throughout his college years, though, it is clear that service to the Church was on his mind. After having graduated from the Augustinian minor seminary, Leo was part of the pre-novitiate program at Villanova. There is no evidence, from the age of fourteen onward, that he ever strayed from his chosen path—or rather his calling—to the Augustinian priesthood.

Leo also served the Church by working as a groundskeeper at the St. Denis Church cemetery, a few towns down Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line. Words like “humble” and “humility” are often thrown around too easily; for instance, applied to ostentatious displays of service rather than to quieter, less visible commitments. The words themselves—humble and humility—both derive from the Latin humus, which means “dirt” or “earth.” Respecting the immortality of the soul by tending to the land in which these souls' earthly remains are buried is, therefore, nearly the very definition of humility.

Indeed, he would have passed the exclusive and world-famous Merion Golf Club on the route between Villanova and St. Denis. But the path of worldly ambition never seems to have appealed to him. Instead, immediately upon graduating, Robert Prevost enrolled in the Augustinian novitiate for the Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel in St. Louis, Missouri.