Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, spent time in St. Louis as an Augustinian novice
Barbara Herrmann “almost had a heart attack” when Pope Leo XIV was announced on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8.
“I just screamed out, ‘That’s Bob!’” she said.
Robert Prevost — Bob, to those who knew him — lived in St. Louis as a novice in the Augustinian order in the late 1970s. The order’s house of novitiate was based at Immaculate Conception Parish on Lafayette Avenue, where Herrmann and her family were parishioners.
Prevost entered the novitiate of the Order of Saint Augustine, Province of Our Lady of Good Counsel, in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1977, and spent one year there, according to the Midwest Augustinians. After completing the one-year novitiate, he moved to Chicago, where he earned a master’s of divinity degree from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in 1981; professed solemn vows on Aug. 29, 1981; and was ordained a priest on June 19, 1982.
According to documents in the archdiocesan archives, the Augustinians began their presence in St. Louis through Augustinian Academy, which operated from 1961-72. The order then took responsibility for Immaculate Conception and St. Henry parishes in south St. Louis in 1972. That same year, Cardinal John Carberry gave permission for the Augustinians to open a house of novitiate at Immaculate Conception.
Immaculate Conception and St. Henry parishes were merged in 1977 into Immaculate Conception/St. Henry Parish. The parish was suppressed in 2005 and its territory subsumed by St. Margaret of Scotland Parish.
Herrmann, now 92 and a parishioner at Holy Name of Jesus in Bellefontaine Neighbors, was not particularly close to Prevost any more than any other of the novices, but her impression of him was always positive.
“The novices came in all shapes, sizes and personalities, like anyone else,” she said. “I always remember him as the quiet person…he was, what you see, a very contemplative person.”
The Immaculate Conception and St. Henry parishioners welcomed the novices with open arms, she said, and the novices in turn were happy to be involved in parish life. They often played ball in Tower Grove Park with parish children after Sunday Mass, or joined students at Compton Heights Catholic School for a game of basketball, she said.
After Prevost and other novices moved to Chicago to continue studies, Herrmann recalled traveling there for weekend visits to celebrate final vows and ordinations.
“We were really a part of the Augustinians, because we were the first group when they came from the academy and came into our church, we were the first group to welcome them” into parish life, she said.
Herrmann can hardly believe that a man she knew is now the pope, she said. But from what she’s seen, he hasn’t changed much. “The person I remember is the person you see: a gentle, nice, kind person,” she said.
“And even though it’s been many, many years since I’ve talked to him or seen him, I most certainly will send a card to him,” she said.
