Father Bob Prevost, today known to the world as Pope Leo XIV, says that when he first arrived in Peru as an Augustinian missionary in 1985, thirty years old and three years a priest, he was naïve. “It was all very natural to me,” he recently told his biographer Elise Ann Allen, to see the clergy working “to build up small communities” and treating the parish as a place “where people come to know one another and help one another and support one another.” When you went to “other places of the country,” however, “there was a very different perspective.” 1 He was putting it mildly. Prevost had landed in a country where the Catholic Church was at war with itself—where some theologians were preaching a gospel of class struggle and political liberation, while others were holding the line for a more doctrinaire faith.…