To the world, Louis “Lou” Prevost's youngest brother is known as Pope Leo XIV who has just been elected the successor of the late Pope Francis. But Lou says his brother will always be Rob to him.
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00:00Louis Lou Provost was in his backyard when news outlets arrived at his home in Port Charlotte on Friday.
00:08The cameras had come for one reason. His youngest brother, Robert Provost, had just been elected Pope.
00:14Now, 69-year-old Robert is known as Pope Leo XIV, and he is the first American to lead the Catholic Church in more than a century.
00:23But to 73-year-old Lou, he will always be Rob and just a little brother.
00:29I'm going to call him Rob, you know. Maybe I'll try to accost him and hug him, and maybe they'll frown on that too.
00:37I don't know what kind of nonsense they do, but yeah, he'll always be Rob to me.
00:43In the back of every night, yeah, he's Pope. He's Pope Leo. But he's still Rob. I can't do that. I can't turn that switch.
00:53It's like, no. He's Pope Leo to the world. To me, he's my little brother Rob. So that's what I will continue to call him and refer to him as.
01:05Robert, who was born in Chicago and raised in Dalton, Illinois, has two brothers.
01:11He grew up in the parish of St. Mary of the Assumption in Riverdale where he went to school and sang in the choir.
01:17He studied theology and math in the U.S., and after graduation, he embarked on decades of missionary work abroad, starting in Peru in 1985.
01:28We're three boys, just like any other three kids. We do boy things, you know, fight and make fun of each other and pick on each other and play with the neighborhood kids like kids do.
01:42But, I don't know, like five or six years old, or when Rob was, we know, you know, something wrong with him. We used to make fun of him.
01:52What's wrong with you? It wasn't anything wrong. It's just that his path was diverging from, like, my path and my other brother's path.
02:01We realized, that's something special going on. He's like, I don't want to say he's holy or too holy, but there was something spiritual about him.
02:12And, I don't know if you heard, he used to like to play priest a lot.
02:18Lou still couldn't believe that his brother had become the new pontiff to succeed the late Pope Francis, who died following a stroke on April 21st.
02:26He expects things will change.
02:28When he first came out, when I first saw, like, as he crossed over the threshold of the balcony, and I saw his forehead, and then his eyes, and it was like, almost brought me to tears, seeing him up there.
02:44And then, when you look at this, it's like, it's my baby brother. He's the Pope, and he's waving to the crowd.
02:51I guess the most negative possibility or thought in my mind about this whole thing is, how will it change our family relationship?
02:59Will we be able to still talk to him regularly, like brothers do? Or is he going to be too busy to talk to us?
03:08I don't expect we'll ever see him come down to the house again.
03:12I think he'll find great joy in it, although it might be hard to be Pope, and there's a lot of responsibility.
03:22He can handle it. He's got that personality.