Pope Leo’s Florida brother says no one better at work

Port Charlotte – A day before Conclave’s new Pope, Louis Previst was called his younger brother Robert Previst, and was more than 5,000 miles away in southwest Florida, brainstormed a joke if he was elected as Pope.

Brothers – Since then, he has become the world’s most important religious leader, and the other has become a self-proclaimed magazine type who publishes profan and vulgar posts on social media, but has made it less of a chance to take that possibility too seriously.

“He recalls, ‘I’m thinking of Six,'” Louis said. “He went, ‘I’m going to be the sixth Pope 6tus.’

White smoke poured from St. Peter’s Cathedral last week, signifying the election of Conclave’s new Pope, Cardinal Dominique Manberti came out to announce his vote. He knew that what was always an opportunity was confirmed. His brother was the Pope.

“He finally came out and said, ‘We have a new Pope.’ And as soon as he went to “r…”, he said, “You knew he was going to say Robert or Robert.” “Of course he said) ‘Robert’, and that’s what my heart was like, ‘Rob is the Pope. Ah, my God.’

After a while, Manberty announced the name of Robert’s chosen pope. As the brothers joked about two days ago, it was not Pope Sixtus, Augustine, Stanislaus, or even Pope Robert, but Pope Leo XIV.

“Pope Leo. What? Where did you get that name from,” the Pope’s brother said in an interview. “But it’s okay, it’s perfect. …It’s short and sweet.”

Currently, as one of the world’s most influential brothers, Louis’s own writings, including a Facebook post on April 5, criticised former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a slur, hinting at Pelosi’s husband being gay and drove the world into view, but they are no longer openly visible.

In an interview with Piers Morgan, Louis Prevost laughed in response to the post.

Since the post he has been “very quiet” and has since refrained from sharing his political views on social media to avoid creating issues with his brother, despite his “MAGA type” beliefs, he said in a TV interview.

Louis Prevast and his wife refused to answer questions about the issue of Fresh Take Florida, the news service at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The couple sat in an interview a few days before the social media posts began to draw attention to the Pope’s Florida brothers.

Personal politics aside, Louis was sure that his brother would be elected after Conclave’s first day ended with a swirling black smoke. After all, he was “one of the top three options” among the 133 eligible voting cardinals.

When the first American-born Pope and Augustinan elected the Pope, 69-year-old Pope Leo XIV is historically unprecedented, but even as a child, the signs of the Pope were always there. His brother said he always had a “little halo on his head.”

In true old brother fashion, Louis gets into trouble with himself and his two younger brothers, Robert and John, where the three grew up in Dalton, Illinois, outside Chicago. And in many cases, Robert had them out of trouble.

Louis recalls one example, only seven years old, four years younger than him at the time. Robert saves them from the gang after the three of them were riding bikes in the town’s “Druggie and the Gang Bangger.”

“Rob said, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and got off his bike, went there, told him for five or ten minutes, and they all came back, shaking hands and hugging,” he said. “It was like his whole life… he has a gift.”

From that moment on, he said he knew that his brother’s childhood activities were more than just a stage. And others saw it too.

Instead of robbing police with Louis and John, Robert played the priest. Before going to bed every night, Robert prayed for the Rosary. At his Catholic school, the nun considered him a priest soon.

Reality did not dawn on Louis until Robert was named Cardinal by the late Pope Francis in 2023.

“Yeah, I understand, I do,” he said. “When he became a cardinal, it was like he was entitled to be the next person. He could be the next Pope. And he is the next person.”

Louis hopes that his brother will bring a new wave of Catholicism to the church. He hopes that American citizens will be inspired by his American origins and reintroduce Robert into religion by seeing Robert not on a pedestal, but a humanized, realistic man who hears what everyone has to say.

He added that his relevance, his travels, his Peruvian citizenship, multilingual ability, and his close relationship with Pope Francis are likely to be the most persuasive factors of Conclave that led to his election.

“What more do you want from the Pope?” Louis said. “If they’re really honest about this, what’s what one of those cardinals did anything outside the city where their church is?”

Becoming a brother to the newly elected Pope is overwhelming, and a barrage of phone and texting will not end the barrage of barrage from everyone who can contact him. Old acquaintances, priests, and devout Catholics constantly attack him with requests, asking him to make a guest appearance at Sunday Mass, and asking him to take the Rosary to the Vatican City for his brothers.

However, Louis and his wife, 59-year-old Deborah Prebble, who lived in the southwestern Florida countryside for about four years, are not sure if they will be able to meet Robert again.

When they first moved to Florida, Louis had been out of treatment for two years in a clinical trial aimed at treating multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. The clinical trials knocked out all the cancer cells in his body, almost “undetectable,” Deborah said.

Before his diagnosis, he was in the Navy for 12 years.

Robert did not visit Louis and Deborah in Port Charlotte, but he visited his previous family at his brother John’s home in New Lennox, Illinois, where his brothers were in a small Chicago suburb home 20 miles from where Dalton grew up. John’s home served as the perfect “half-point” between Chicago O’Hare International Airport and the Florida couple’s previous home in Florida couple’s beach park, according to Illinois.

“When he was cardinal, he could go home for summer holidays, be by the pool and have a barbecue with his family,” she said. “After the Pope became Pope, no one has returned to where they came… If you don’t get the big picture, it won’t happen.”

In a backyard filled with plants scattered in a makeshift greenhouse and in chirp sounds from the Sun and Tita, the sun conure parrots placed in the couple’s two cages, Deborah reflects on her new reality.

“We lost our brothers, but the world won the Pope,” she said.

However, through tears of losing her stepbrother, she says she knows he will succeed.

“It couldn’t have happened to a better person.”

The story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Reporters can be contacted at kairilowery@ufl.edu. You can donate here to support our students.