A friendship that crosses the Atlantic without ever breaking.
On August 22nd, while Leo XIV was setting foot on the soil of the Republic of San Marino and then traveling to Rimini to address the participants of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, another, more discreet but equally revealing event was unfolding in the shadow of this papal activity. Father Raymond Flores, an Augustinian priest and pastor of St. Jude Parish in Chicago, confided that he had visited the Pope during his vacation in Rome, describing the encounter as an experience he would cherish for the rest of his life. This testimony is not simply a travel memory: it reveals the very fabric of the bond that unites a pope to his homeland, that tenuous yet tenacious thread that refuses to break when one transitions from the status of parishioner's son to that of successor of Peter.
What is striking about this story is its very ordinariness. Father Flores is not a cardinal on a ceremonial visit, nor a head of state seeking a diplomatic audience. He is the pastor of a community on Chicago's South Side, the very same one where John Prevost, the Pope's older brother, continues to attend church like any other parishioner. This close connection is far from anecdotal: it reveals a Church that, at the top of its visible hierarchy, remains rooted in ordinary faces, Sunday masses, and meals shared between childhood friends and local priests. Even though the successor of the apostles resides in the Vatican palaces, his heart continues to beat to the rhythm of family reunions in Dolton and Riverdale, those modest suburbs where young Robert Francis Prevost grew up.
Father Flores has known the Pope for a long time. He joined the Augustinians in 2017, when the man who would become Leo XIV was still Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru. Since then, he has accompanied John Prevost in numerous media interviews about his brother, now the Pope. Last year, during the surprise election of May 8, 2025, he and John Prevost rushed to Rome, without a specific plan, simply driven by the desire to be present for the moment of joy. He was then able to witness the new Pope's first outings outside the Vatican, notably to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano, a place dear to Augustinian spirituality, and then to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, where Leo XIV prayed at Francis's tomb. This long-standing loyalty gives full weight to the testimony gathered at Castel Gandolfo: it is not an isolated protocol meeting, but the natural extension of a pastoral and fraternal relationship that continues to deepen.
The South Side rectory, a laboratory of unexpected fidelity
Saint Jude Parish occupies a unique place in the spiritual geography of the new pontificate. While Robert Francis Prevost grew up in the parish of Saint Mary of the Assumption in Riverdale, where he served as an altar boy from the age of six for the 6:30 a.m. Friday Mass, it was at Saint Jude that his family continued to attend Sunday Mass over the decades, and it is there that his brother John remains an active parishioner today. In August 2024, when he was still Cardinal Prevost, Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, it was in this same parish that he made his last American visit before his election, participating in a series of conferences to discuss, in the words of Father Flores, «so many wonderful and hopeful things in the life of the Church.» This detail is not insignificant: the future pope chose, a few months before his election, to return not to the Roman circles he frequented daily, but to the parish of his extended childhood, to speak to ordinary faithful.
This fidelity to places and faces finds a striking echo in Scripture. The prophet Elijah, after confronting the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, returns exhausted to the desert, and it is there, under the terebinth tree, that an angel of the Lord comes to feed him before sending him back on his mission: «Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you» (1 Kings 19:7). There is a lesson in this divine gesture that Father Flores’ visit illustrates in its own way: before returning to face the great affairs of the world, in San Marino or Rimini, the supreme pastor of the universal Church also needs to rediscover the humble terebinth tree of his origins, this nourishing connection with people who ask nothing of him but his fraternal presence. This dimension is never anecdotal in spiritual life: it reminds us that holiness is not built in the abstraction of power, but in the incarnate continuity of the humblest relationships.
The documentary "Leo from Chicago," broadcast by the Holy See's media in the fall of 2025, had already highlighted this dimension through testimonies gathered in the United States, revealing a man who, from childhood, showed a marked inclination towards religious life, playing at celebrating Mass in the family basement and reciting prayers in Latin with an early seriousness that amused his relatives. Father Flores appears in the documentary, alongside several parishioners from St. Jude, as a privileged witness to this continuity between the boy from Dolton and the Roman Pontiff. His recurring presence in interviews devoted to the Pope, particularly during the first hundred days of the pontificate when he was interviewed jointly with John Prevost by a Chicago television station, confirms that he is not an occasional visitor but a companion accustomed to carrying the living memory of the Pope to his home community.
What the persistence of the Augustinian appeal reveals
Here, we must consider the theological significance of this relational fidelity in light of Augustinian spirituality itself, the very spirituality that has shaped Leo XIV's pastoral identity since his entry into the Order of Saint Augustine. For Saint Augustine, friendship is never an optional addition to Christian life: it constitutes its connective tissue, the concrete space where charity is tested. In his "Confessions," the Bishop of Hippo describes the loss of a dear friend as a tearing of the soul itself, so deeply does true friendship engage the whole person. This understanding explains why the Pope, despite the overwhelming magnitude of his responsibilities, continues to receive with such attention a parish priest who simply comes to greet him during his vacation: this is not a matter of protocol, but the consistent application of a theology of spiritual friendship inherited directly from his father in the faith.
This continuity between the private man and the public pontiff is also evident in the way Leo XIV chose to spend his second summer as pontiff. After a twenty-three-day stay at Castel Gandolfo between July 5 and 27, devoted to prayer, reading, and some exercise, he returned there a second time from August 12 to 18, thus continuing a summer tradition that his predecessor had abandoned throughout his pontificate. This deliberate resumption of a practice abandoned by Francis is not simply a matter of personal comfort: it reflects a conception of papal rest as a time open to encounter, far removed from pure contemplative isolation. It is precisely within this renewed openness that Father Flores' visit takes place, made possible by a pope who refuses to let vacations become a parenthesis cut off from his deepest ties.
The connection between Leo XIV and Chicago has never been limited to private reunions. Last May, a city delegation led by Mayor Brandon Johnson traveled to the Vatican to formally invite the Pope to visit his hometown in 2027, while a foundation dedicated to his legacy organized the first pilgrimage to the places of his childhood, including his birthplace in Dolton and the parish where he served as an altar boy. These initiatives, combined with Father Flores's testimony, paint a picture of an entire city mobilized to honor, without ever exploiting, the man it continues to consider one of its own. Therein lies a profound ecclesiological lesson: the universality of the Petrine ministry, far from erasing the local particularities from which it sprang, magnifies them and places them at the service of the entire world. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians from his prison, expressed a similar tenderness toward the community that had seen him grow in faith: «I thank my God every time I remember you; in all my prayers for all of you I always rejoice» (Philippians 1:3-4). This gratitude for remembrance, interwoven with concrete recognition of specific individuals, finds a precise echo in the relationship that Leo XIV maintained with his extended home parish.
This fidelity is not without spiritual demands for those who benefit from it. Receiving the confidence of a pope, sharing a moment of rest with him away from the cameras, commits Father Flores and his community to a particular responsibility: that of not transforming this privileged bond into worldly pride, but of living it as a service rendered to the universal Church through the humble witness of a neighborhood parish. The First Epistle of Peter recalls this collective vocation of every priestly people, called to gather together like living stones around the cornerstone: «And you yourselves, like living stones, are being built together into a spiritual house» (1 Peter 2:5). Saint Jude, in this sense, is not simply the biographical backdrop to a pontificate: it remains a living stone in this edifice, called to continue its own mission even as one of its children now bears the universal burden of Peter.
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Lectio divina
«Get up and eat, for the journey is too long for you.» 1 Kings 19:7
You who carry a burden, what is your hidden source that nourishes you before you set out again? Is there a face, a place, an old friendship that you return to when the weight becomes too great? Are you afraid to admit that even the highest ministry needs a terebinth tree to rest in? What would you do if the angel came to you today to tell you that the journey is too long for you alone?
Lord, you send the angel beneath the terebinth tree. You know that the journey wearies even the prophets. You who nourish before sending, nourish also my weary heart. Remind me of the faces that carried me yesterday. May I return, like Elijah, to draw from the spring before setting out again. May I never despise the humble bread that precedes the mission.
A loaf of bread placed under the tree, a hand reaching out in the silence of the desert.
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