By Alexander Villegas and Marco Aquino
CHULUCANAS, Peru (Reuters) – Hector Camacho remembers Robert Prevost, set to be formally inaugurated as Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, as a young jeans-wearing missionary from Chicago with broken Spanish, landing in Peru at a time when the country was being torn apart by internal conflict.
Camacho was a young teenager and altar boy in 1985 in the northern Peruvian town of Chulucanas at the edge of the jungle when Prevost arrived to be a parish priest. It was the future pope’s first time in a country that would be his home on and off for the next 40 years.
Reuters traveled to the town where Prevost first started putting his religious education in the United States and Rome into practice, speaking to those who recalled him as a charming young man with an early talent for the ministry.
“He had this aura that spoke to people. People flocked to him,” Camacho, now 53, said in a tiny chapel in the village of Yapatera where Prevost once preached.
Camacho recalled traveling to the adobe mud-brick churches that dot the region with Prevost, sometimes walking on foot, sometimes on horseback, carrying crucifixes and ceremonial wine. He remembered Prevost asking altar boys for help with words in Spanish, taking them on trips to beaches, and hiring karate, swimming and basketball coaches to keep the town’s youth away from crime.
“He came here when he was really young, but we thank that young man who walked with us, played basketball in the arena and would take us to the beach for the weekend.”
Despite gold and other mineral riches, northern Peru is an area of high poverty, often hit by flooding in the rainy season.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was roiled by internal conflict between the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path and government forces, violence that left some 70,000 people dead.
Fidel Alvarado, a priest in the Chulucanas diocese, was a 20-year-old student in the seminary when he met Prevost. He recalled a bomb destroying the church door, and threats made to the priests, with Prevost and the other North American priests being told to leave in 24 hours or they would be killed.
But they stayed, said Alvarado.
“What convinced them to stay was the people, they had traveled around and felt the love of the people,” he said.
In Yapatera, an old, undated sepia-tone photo showed a young Prevost holding up a chalice of wine at the church, where the once dirt floor has now been cemented over.
The room where Prevost stayed as a young missionary at the diocese residence in Chulucanas was on the second floor, past a small garden courtyard. It was simple but spacious with a bed, desk, armchair, night stand and a shared bathroom.
Cristobal Mejia, 70, current bishop of the Chulucanas diocese, showed Reuters around. He remembered Prevost as a studious man who typically went to bed at 11 p.m. and woke up at 5 a.m. to pray in a prayer room adorned with stained-glass. Nearby sits the garage, where there is a pick-up truck similar to the one Prevost used to enjoy driving in the area.
Prevost, who became a Peruvian citizen in 2015, over the years became fluent in Spanish. His favorite dishes are some of the country’s staples, including lime-cured fish ceviche and chicken chicharron.
From 2015 to 2023 he was bishop of Chiclayo city, some four hours’ drive from his first parish.
‘SHEPHERD THAT SMELLS OF SHEEP’
Locals Reuters spoke to kept saying the same thing about Prevost – that he was like a “shepherd that smelled of the sheep,” meaning he was very close to his congregation.
“He always spoke to us about the value of community, which is part of the beauty of Saint Augustine,” Alvarado said. Leo XIV will be the first pope from the Augustinian order.
Alvarado said the Augustinians wanted to go out to where the people were, and that the order gave scholarships for people to study engineering and law at university.
“I hoped he’d take the name of Augustine, but knowing Robert he didn’t want to make it look like Augustinians were the center of things and were governing,” Alvarado said. The last Leo was known for his commitment to social justice.
“He’s saying he wants a church that listens to the plight of the poor, and I think Robert is going to do that, he’s going to unite instead of divide,” said Alvarado.
Oscar Antonio Murillo Villanueva, 64, a priest at the nearby Trujillo archdiocese, said he knew Prevost in the late 1980s and that Prevost had helped him after a period of personal tumult.
“He suffered with the pain of the Peruvian people,” Villanueva said.
“He never remained silent about the injustices that occurred here in Trujillo and in Peru… the massacres that occurred in Peru, the situations the rulers did nothing about, the rainy season floods.”
‘HE HAD THIS CALMNESS’
Others recalled Prevost as fun and cool-headed, never being guided by strong emotions. They said, though, he could be strict when it came to academic rigor, expelling students from the seminary for cheating.
Jose William Rivadeneyra, a seminarian and now a teacher, remembered Prevost as jovial. “He made a lot of jokes and it was contagious. He had an unrivaled sense of humor.”
Camacho, who kept serving as an altar boy for Prevost when he later went to Trujillo, said he never saw Prevost angry or emotional, even in the toughest of circumstances.
“One day I found him packing his clothes and he said he was going back to the United States because his mother had died,” Camacho said.
“I felt an immense pain, I cried for him, but he had this calmness. He was very prepared, like his mother was in the hands of God, who would receive her.”
Camacho asked Prevost if he could name his daughter after his late mother and he agreed, later becoming Mildred Camacho’s godfather.
Now 29, Mildred has children of her own and says she has kept in contact with Prevost as he rose through the ranks of the Church, all the way to the Vatican.
“He sent me letters, he sent me mail, he told me about his trips, missions,” she said, showing Reuters photos he had shared.
“His phrase was always, keep me in your prayers as I have you present in mine.”
(Reporting by Alexander Villegas and Marco Aquino; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O’Brien)
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