NEED TO KNOW
- John Doughney, 69, speaks to PEOPLE about his childhood with Robert Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV
- The Chicago native, who became the first American Pope in history on May 8, was nicknamed “Holy” by friends, Doughey says
- Doughney remembers Pope Leo as “kind, compassionate and humble”
Pope Leo XIV has had a pristine reputation since he was just a boy, so much so that his grade-school friends had a synonymous nickname for the new pope, who was born Robert Provost in Chicago, decades ago.
In an interview with PEOPLE, John Doughney of Grapevine, Texas, recalled his early days with Pope Leo when they were just kids at St. Mary of the Assumption School.
“When you think about a 13-year-old boy on the South Side of Chicago … typically people would not immediately say, ‘oh, kind, compassionate, humble.’ But those are words that you would use,” the retired teacher, 69, tells PEOPLE.
“Even as a 13-year-old, he was unique and the rest of us could see that.”
Doughney and Pope Leo were in the same grade for eight years they attended St. Mary’s.
“It’s been quite a long time since I last saw Robert or spoke to him. But when I saw his name as a potential Pope candidate, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. I went to school with him.’ And the memories of just how he was, they just came flooding back,” Doughney tells PEOPLE.
“There was a mixture of surprise and excitement,” after he found out, he says.
“The surprise comes, not that he would’ve been chosen Pope, because he, to me, is the perfect choice for Pope. But the fact that there had never been an American pope,” Doughney adds.
The 267th pope is the first ever to be born in the U.S.
Doughney tells PEOPLE there isn’t a “specific incident” he can recall about Pope Leo, who was chosen in the Cardinal conclave on May 8.
“There are a lot of singular incidents that I can point to about other people, and typically those are not very positive,” Doughney says. “We tend to remember the bad things that kids do. And for Robert, there was a constancy of how he was and how he held himself even as a 13-year-old, which is, I mean, that’s the unique part of it is 13-year-olds are developing and their hormones are raging and they’re defiant and they’re moody and they’re pushing limits. And he was almost like the calm in the adolescent storm.”
“He was always kind. Never had saw him have any kind of words with anybody else. And certainly no kind of physical altercations, which was a common occurrence in the south side of Chicago,” he says just before revealing what everyone called Pope Leo.
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“We even called him Holy. His brothers even referred to him as Holy, and he really was. I do believe that he knew what his path was going to be,” Doughney tells PEOPLE. “I don’t know that he knew his path would take him to the papacy, but he knew his path was into the Catholic church as a priest and then as a missionary. And very few 13-year-olds are that steadfast in knowing this is the path I’m taking and this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.”
Doughney says while most of the boys at St. Mary’s would behave at mass because of the nuns, “Robert was good at it simply because I think it was something very natural for him.”
“Some of us did it because we were being compliant. He did it because it was part of him,” he tells PEOPLE.
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