Peruvians celebrate election of Pope Leo XIV in a parish he helped to build

Bells rang out from Trujillo Cathedral in northern Peru on Thursday to announce the election of the new Pope.

Trujillo is a city the now Pope Leo XIV knows well. The then Father Robert Prevost spent decades living and working in Peru, including ten years in Trujillo as head of the Augustinian seminary.

Prevost, 69, first arrived in Peru in 1985, with the order of the Augustinian Fathers, and served in the prelature of Chulucanas in the department of Piura, near the border with Ecuador, until 1986.

He spent a decade at the head of the Augustinian seminary of Trujillo, where he taught canon law and served as judge of the regional ecclesiastical tribunal.

Jhonatan Cruz was an altar boy of the former Catholic priest:

"We know Father Roberto Prevost. He is very close to us. My mother, father, and brothers - we all came to take care of the parish house in 1990, which is just down there. That's where the first Augustinian priests came, inside one of them (houses) was Father Roberto Prevost, he was the first parish priest here that did great work in the whole area here in Montserrat in those years."

'A very simple, very quiet person'

During his time in Trujillo, Father Prevost helped to build two Catholic parishes, Our Lady of Monserrat and St. Rita de Cascia.

Friar Ramiro Castillo is a member of the Augustinian Order in Trujillo. He remembers Prevost as a "very simple, very quiet person."

"When there was an assembly, meetings, I remember that he was a very quiet person, very calm, always as if he was thinking over things, over and over before giving an opinion. There are many anecdotes of who is now Pope Leo XIV."

Prevost returned to the United States in 1998 and was elected provincial of the Augustinian Province of Chicago.

He did not return to Peru until 2014, when Pope Francis appointed him apostolic administrator of the diocese of Chiclayo.

The following year he was named bishop of the city.

In 2023 he was promoted to archbishop, and then made a cardinal in 2024.

Since arriving in Rome, Prevost kept a low public profile but was well-known to the men who count.

Significantly, he presided over one of the most revolutionary reforms Francis made, when he added three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations to forward to the pope.

The first Augustinian pope, Chicago-born Prevost is also the first American and first Peruvian, having taken citizenship during his time in the country.