Street vendors sit in front of a billboard displaying a picture of Pope Leo (AP Photo/Hussein Al-Mulla)
Becoming pope changes many things. It gives man a new name, a new home, a new wardrobe, and spiritual leadership for 1.4 billion Catholics. He even became the moral voice of the world against its president. What it doesn’t seem to give him is the ability to change his phone number at a bank in South Chicago without being asked to come in person. Pope Leo According to Tom McCarthy, a Chicago priest, the new pope contacted his American bank two months after assuming the papacy to update his contact details.
It should have been a routine administrative task. Instead, it became a parable of modern life, where even the Bishop of Rome could humble himself by checking on a client.Leo introduced himself as Robert Prevost. The bank employee asked the requisite security questions, listened, and then issued a judgment familiar to anyone who has dealt with corporate procedures: He had to come in person.
This, for obvious reasons, was not possible. Prevost had traveled to Rome to attend the conclave as a cardinal, and after being elected pope, he could no longer simply return home to run errands. He told the employee that he would not be able to enter. After some time, he attempted what must have been one of the strangest name-drops in banking history.“Do you care if I tell you that I am Pope Leo?”It didn’t happen. The employee commented.There is a beautiful absurdity to the story. The cardinals accepted him.
The Vatican had accepted him. The Catholic world accepted him. But the banking system did not do that. To the operator on the phone, he was not the newly elected pope but an agent who had not completed the required procedures. In fairness, she probably also had good reason to be skeptical. “I am the Pope” is precisely what a prank caller might say if he had ambition but not much imagination.The Pope then summoned a priest he knew in Chicago, who gained access to the bank president.
Even there, according to McCarthy, the first response was not awe but politics. “That’s our policy,” the bank president initially said, before eventually realizing that losing the Pope’s account would constitute an extraordinary failure in customer service.The details were eventually changed, but the tale caught on because it embodies something wonderfully human about a role usually wrapped in celebration. Popes bless crowds, deliver sermons, and carry the weight of the global church.
They also have phone numbers, bank accounts, and the same old problem as everyone else: systems that don’t care who you are until the right box is checked.It also reminds us of a similar moment in 2013, when Pope Francis, after his election in Rome, called his newspaper vendor in Buenos Aires to cancel a delivery. The seller initially thought it was a joke. In both cases, the papacy began not with thunder, but with the ordinary business of life that it had suddenly left behind.This is what makes the story of the lion so magical. It is not a scandal, it is not a crisis, it is not a theological dispute. He is simply the Pope who discovered that in the modern world, divine promotions may give you the keys to the Vatican, but they may not enable you to get past the bank compliance office.God said yes. Roma said yes. The council said yes. The employee said he still has to show up in person.