Exclusive | Pope Leo XIV has a disarming humility that will unite church, world leaders, Catholics who know first American pontiff say

LAS VEGAS — Pope Leo XIV is an unassuming listener with a “disarming humility” who’ll try to find common ground with world leaders, including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, two Catholics who knew him as Chicago native Cardinal Robert F.Prevost told The Post.“The impression that I got in our conversation was that he was a listener,” Sister Margaret Obrovac, who recently concluded a stint at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, said in a telephone interview. She and the then-cardinal had “a very enlightening and very insightful” theological discussion while accompanying the late Pope Francis on a September 2024 journey to Belgium and Luxembourg.“It was an informal conversation, and we just happened to get into some deeper issues in that conversation,” the Daughters of St.

Paul nun said.Although Obrovac didn’t detail those “deeper issues,” she said the new pope, a 69-year-old Augustinian who until Thursday headed the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, genuinely heard her comments. “He looked for what he could agree with and what he could and then be able to nuance it in a way that was enlightening also for me,” she said.While Obrovac said she doesn’t “know if he even remembers” their chat, Leo’s approach impressed her.“If he can bring that to the papacy, and I believe he will, we can look at a church that will be more united, if we ourselves are willing to be nuanced, if we are willing to be enlightened by someone else and not just have an echo chamber for our own thoughts, I think that to me, that’s what it means to be unassuming,” she explained.Las Vegas Archbishop George Thomas, who spent 90 minutes with Leo during a 2023 visit to Rome, remembers the cleric who advanced the Nevada episcopate to the rank of a metropolitan see, but also had him promoted to the rank of archbishop.“He’s a man who had considerable influence and power during the Pope Francis administration, but he just does not wear that p...