His friends called her Millie. The future Pope called her ma.
Mildred Prevost, whose youngest son, Robert, one day would take the name of Pope Leo XIV, cut his own extraordinary path of ambition, talent and religious devotion through his hometown of Chicago.
Born in Mildred Agnes Martínez, she obtained a degree in Education in 1947 and attended the postgraduate school at Depaul University, an academic path that was unusual for women at that time. He waited until he was about 30 years old, according to Cook County records, to marry Louis Prevost, who was eight years as a young man. Mrs. Prevost was between 30 and 40 years old when she had children, three children were born within only four years.
An enthusiastic artist, a regular in sketches and plays of school funds, and an consummate singer, Mrs. Prevost once registered her own interpretation of “Ave Maria”, a hymn or a considerable difficulty for an amateur.
“That was the registered brand song,” said his eldest son, who also called Louis, in an interview on Saturday. “She would call him.”
The most dominant thing in the life of Mrs. Prevost was her family and a deep Catholic faith, the people who knew her said, the letter a conviction of conviction of a lifetime that made her a central force behind Robert’s path to the priesthood and beyond.
Mrs. Prevost died in 1990, after being diagnosed with cancer and lasting chemotherapy treatments. But their children will meet in Rome the week of Mother’s Day, days after the youngest of the three was chosen leader of the 1,400 million Roman Catholics in the world.
Robert Prevost passed his childhood in the suburb of Dolton in Chicago, immersed in the Catholic culture that revolved around the family parish, St. Mary of the Assunion, on the southern side of the city.
The Catholic School was a generational family tradition. Mildred Prevost graduated from the Immaculate High School on the north side in 1929, according to the newspaper records, and was the young daughter of a large Catholic family. (Unlike her son Robert and almost all possible neighbors on the south side, she was a fan of puppies).
From the moment he was a child, it was clear that Robert Prevost would become a priest, his family said, and his mother was a fervent defender of that desire. When I wanted to attend a minor seminar in Michigan for high school, she and her father allowed her to go.
“They gave him a lot of confidence,” said Bishop Daniel Turley, who with the future Pope when he was a teenager, just out of Michigan’s school. “When he gets into the Augustinian seminary, he did it with the breath of his loving mother.”
Bishop Turley recalled having met Mrs. Prevost-Close half a century ago, and her pride for her little son and her own intense Catholic conviction.
“She was practically a saint,” he said. “She was just one of those people who know and feel the presence of God.”
Mrs. Prevost made sure to pierce her children in practical matters, said young Louis Prevost. Remember to be standing in family kitchen while your mother explained the steps of a recipe, doing any of her favorites: Goulash, Chicken Lo, homemade pizza or Rosbif meat.
“We learned to cook, we learned to clean, we learned to iron the clothes,” he said. “She taught us all the necessary skills to be alone and keep himself.”
But Mrs. Prevost also seemed to have bones driven by intellectual interests. She offered as a volunteer in Catholic school libraries. In 1950, he reviewed “Helena”, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, for a book talk with a local Catholic Women’s Group, and according to the Chicago Tribune, he participated in a forum entitled “The Catholic woman in the professional world.”
“Our whole family was an education,” said Louis Prevost. “I think I may have wanted to be a teacher one day, but that never gets used to fruit because he married and had children.”
She and her husband, who died in 1997, probably couldn’t have imagined that her little son would one day become a potato, said John Prevost, another brother of the Pope who lives in the suburbs of Chicago.
“They would be in cloud 9,” he said.
Robert Chiarito Contributed reports.
