Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, has been elected the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He has taken the papal name of Pope Leo XIV. He is the first pope from the United States.
As Crux's John L Allen previously wrote in his "Papabile for the Day" series, once upon a time, it was said that the idea of an American pope was unthinkable. In the beginning, it was for basically logistical reasons – steamships from the New World took so long to reach Rome that American cardinals often arrived too late to vote, and in any event they were never part of the political sausage-grinding before the conclave began.
