American Pope by Daniel Burke & Scott Detrow

American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City

By Daniel Burke & Scott Detrow

Flatiron Books 2026

As the life stories of so many public figures demonstrate, writing biographies of still-extant people is inherently perilous. Lincoln goes to the theater. Byron dies in Greece. Prince Charles finally gets a new job. And suddenly, every existing biography written in the hope of pro tem viability is tinnily outdated.

NPR religion editor Daniel Burke and “All Things Considered” cohost Scott Detrow are likely aware of this danger, particularly since it hovers over their new book American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City. This is the story of Robert Prevost’s dorky youth and hyper-earnest young manhood as he entered the Church and the Augustinian Order, and although in their telling he seems to have been a cheerful, intelligent, multifaceted figure, there’d even so be no book about him if he weren’t going on to become Pope Leo XIV in 2025.

It's interesting to watch him deal with the Church matters of his day, including the massive sex scandal that broke into public awareness twenty years ago, although his response was circumspect to the point of being mealy-mouthed, with him writing to his Augustian leaders in 2003, “I am sorry to have to write such a letter, but it is extremely important that we be prepared to respond compassionately and responsibly if there are cases of wrongdoing on the part of any of our brothers.” Which is, given the fact that the wrongdoing is decades of child molestation and the intentional shuffling around of known child predators, pretty much the bare moral minimum (particularly since the comment is unclear on who’s receiving the compassionate responses).

The portrait presented here is, oddly enough, that of a comfortingly ordinary man. This underscores what is naturally the most remarkable thing to happen to this ordinary man. At the death of Pope Francis, the princes of the Church assemble to discuss and debate (and, as our authors make clear, eat, good Lord, how cardinals eat). The book sees some of this through the perspective of US Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a charismatic Trump-thug who relates the dark horse nature of Prevost’s chances at ascending to the throne of Saint Peter:

Dolan had been a public face of the American church for two decades. But sitting in the General Congregation meetings, he began to consider that the first American pontiff might be a radically different kind of figure. During one of the meetings’ many coffee breaks, he brought an espresso to an older cardinal, one who was too old to vote in the conclave. They sat there together in the auditorium sipping their drinks.

“So, who do you think?” Dolan asked.

The older cardinal looked down toward a group of their peers at the front of the room. He pointed at Prevost.

The authors do their best to highlight the position of this new Pope facing an uncertain future and “massive technological change.” “The math major and canon lawyer had taken note as artificial intelligence, in particular, had exponentially advanced by leaps and bounds, largely without any moral guidelines or boundaries shaping its use and development.”

AI, yes indeed. But American Pope was likely still in drafts when US Vice President James David Donald Bowman Vance said the Pope should be “careful” when talking about theology. The book had not yet been printed when the US President called this Pope a “loser.” The book was only just in bookstores when Pope Leo underwent surgery for lung cancer. His Holiness is over 70, but even so, American Pope is something of a prologue. The papacy will be the point of the life, and with any luck, that papacy might still have ten very eventful years to go. Maybe we can look for a sequel in 2036.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News