CHULUCANAS, Peru. – 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, the 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.
