1968, in the memory of many civil rights activists, was a year that changed the world.

A general strike in France ousted the DeGaulle government, demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War were beginning to take up a harder political militancy, and student movements across the Western Hemisphere, from Mexico City to Montreal, showed signs that the strands of the postwar social contract were wearing thin in a way suggesting that “The center cannot hold.”

In the United States, and especially Chicago, where a young Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, attended minor seminary starting as a school-aged youth, it was one of the most consequential and violent years in Black American political history.

As new allegations and survivors emerge describing how then-Bishop Prevost mishandled serious claims of sexual misconduct against his subordinate priests in Peru and Chicago, the painful lessons of 1968 echo more than half a century afterward. How did these events shape the faith journey of the new Pope and his moral compass as he was entering ministry?

More importantly, how will it inform the theological trajectory of his Papacy as it leads the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics?

Within the span of mere months, beginning in April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Fred Hampton were all murdered whilst Richard Nixon succeeded in crystallizing his “Southern Strategy,” the GOP method of courting white Dixiecrat voters based upon open rejection of racial integration. The seemingly-halcyon days that had been prophesied four years previously by the March on Washington and the enactment of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts rapidly melted away to reveal a despicably violent skeleton laid beneath the surface.

Dr. King bemoaned having mistakenly integrated his people “into a burning building,” a towering inferno where the “triple evils” of poverty, war, and racism were metastasizing into an uncontrollable social calamity. His famed “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at the historic Riverside Church precisely a year to the day before his murder, had named the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and its Vietnam policy as barbarism.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent…

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

The liberal establishment and clergy that had supported Dr. King’s Southern campaigns against Jim Crow suddenly abandoned and denounced him in the mainstream press. As the ultimate act of disavowal, President Lyndon Johnson ordered King’s Secret Service security detail be withdrawn, opening the vulnerability that would be easily exploited by the bullet that felled Dr. King.

All this in the year when Robert Prevost was a thirteen-year-old minor seminarian.

The question of whether or not the Prevost family members identified as Black has to be grounded in recognition of the deep racism that Dr. King encountered during his time in Chicago, a matter demonstrated brilliantly in the HBO Documentary King in the Wilderness (dir. Peter Kunhardt, 2018). In the two decades after the end of the Second World War, Chicago had become a port of entry for various fugitive Nazi war criminals, ushered into the US via the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Paperclip, and they made their presence known when Dr. King sought to bring his campaign northwards in 1965. Two decades after fascism’s supposed defeat, German war veterans and their progeny were gladly utilizing the swastika on protest placards and signs to intimidate Freedom Movement organizers. The racism was stark and intense.

Likewise, there is something absent from this framing about whether or not the family identifies as Black, which is a complex matter within the US Catholic Church and particularly the South. Maryland was named in honor of its high population of Catholics and the conspiracy to kill President Lincoln was launched in the home of a Catholic Confederate sympathizer. It was a very ugly world for mixed relationships in the Catholic Church over the past 150 years.

Does he identify, or did she identify, or did they identify? That is not as consequential as pediatric socialization. As a school teacher, I have a basic understanding of child psychology and where racism plays out in early childhood socialization. Even if he never considered himself Black, he very likely could have attended integrated Sunday Mass with his maternal grandparents. Regardless of self-identification, they were still in Black Catholic dioceses and those pediatric moments of socialization are so consequential. After a decade of research into the topic for my own Masters in Education, I have come to the conclusion that one of the greatest thing that the Old Left did was set up all those integrated summer camps that politically educated New Lefties from diapers to SDS.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that the 1960s was the moment of final integration for European Catholics into hegemonic American whiteness, with President Kennedy beginning the decade as a representative for the healthy distance between faith and politics. One of his most despicable moments was authoring a chapter for Profiles in Courage defending Edmund G. Ross. This Moderate was the decisive GOP vote that found Andrew Johnson innocent of charges that he was impeached over, which in turn led to the complete dismantling of the federal Reconstruction oversight, thereby enabling the creation of Jim Crow apartheid and the sharecropping system. From the failure of the Johnson impeachment stems everything from the lynch mob to the poll tax.

In essence, Kennedy was dog-whistling to the Dixiecrats in order to make clear he would not rock the boat on integration and implementation of Brown v. Board.

But by contrast, the Baby Boomer generation, unshackled of their parents’ Medieval prejudices after the Second Vatican Council officially renounced doctrinal antisemitism and racism, finished off the Sixties moving in a trajectory wildly at odds with the belligerence that Joseph McCarthy had demonstrated 15 years previously.

The U.S. church faced its own internal civil war over Vietnam, with prominent Catholics like AFL-CIO President George Meany denigrating Dr. King for his antiwar stance whilst the Berrigan Brothers were lighting federal draft office files on fire. While some toked up, tuned in, and dropped out, a not-insignificant number of Baby Boomer Catholics became priests or joined religious orders in order to serve the poor, with missionary work seen as holy and admirable. Many of them found tremendous affinity with the anarcho-pacifism of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter Maurin, Thomas Merton, and a perception of the Hierarchy as an impediment as opposed to a benefit for anyone. Still others embraced the French Worker Priest movement, creating the urban street priests ministering in the most economically-blighted localities in the United States. Furthermore, many queer Catholics, thanks to the relative liberalization of seminary enrollment, sought to live celibate lives as gay priests or religious orders members.

And then of course there was the 1968 Democratic Party Convention, where Mayor Richard Daley’s party machine went insane and allowed the Chicago Police to go full-on Gestapo against antiwar demonstrators. Grant Park looked like a Hollywood restaging of the Battle of Flanders Fields while Michigan Avenue was consumed by a blue stormtrooper parade armed with billy clubs. Young Robert Prevost was probably unimpressed by the Yippies nominating a pig for president, but it is imaginable he might have seen the judicial hypocrisy manifest at the trial of the Chicago Seven. Most famously, this was the year when arch-reactionary Catholic William F. Buckley debated Gore Vidal.

Four years to the day after the March on Washington, the Democratic coalition that had passed the Civil Rights bill publicly imploded on Chicago’s WBKB-ABC Channel 7 nightly network news broadcasts.

And this Haitian-descended minor seminarian was watching it as someone raised in a Democratic machine town, a seeming apocalypse now on network news.

How Robert Prevost perceived himself in the midst of one of the most consequential years of American political history last century is difficult to ascertain. In 1968, he was 13, so perhaps he was sheltered still from a great many truths about a war in Vietnam that had relied on the puppet regime of the Catholic Diem dictatorship. A major hub of Cold War Liberalism was informed by Catholic anticommunism.

Yet simultaneously, when Walter Cronkite declared the war unwinnable at the close of an evening news broadcast that year, the liberal concensus itself was compelled to admit the Tet Offensive had demonstrated a major failure. When the North Vietnamese launched a multi-pronged attack against the South under the cover of the Tet New Year celebrations, the battle ended as a Pyrrhic victory, symbolizing in a micro sense the quagmiry nature of the entire Southeast Asian endeavor.

In retrospect, what does Prevost think about that year? He was still Stateside during Watergate, which not only demonstrated the corruption of President Nixon via the audiotapes but the entire Indochinese fiasco via The Pentagon Papers. Watergate is only remembered today for the domestic crimes Nixon committed, but at the time the Democrats were likewise pursuing an indictment for foreign policy crimes like the secret bombings of Cambodia.

On Friday May 10, 2025, Amy Goodman hosted a segment on Democracy Now! featuring Peter Isely, a survivor of clergy abuse who has played a major role as cofounder of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and James V. Grimaldi, executive editor of National Catholic Reporter. The heated exchange became repulsive on the part of Grimaldi, whose defense of Bishop Prevost’s handling of accusations against priests in his Peruvian diocese in 2014-2023 included a petulant and self-serving tone. Yet here are the words of a survivor who says that this sexual assault began when she was a 9 year old girl.

ANA MARÍA QUISPE: [translated] What happened to me was around 2007. At the time, the priests would invite us to celebrations, to go on missions, to pray the Rosary with him or to Mass. He would insist on having youth go on missions with him to rural regions in the mountains. After so much insistence, my parents agreed, because the priests and I were really close. When it was time to go to bed, he ended up sleeping with me. It was something I didn’t expect, and it was very uncomfortable. … In regards to Father Ricardo Yesquén, I attended a youth missionary group with him. … I was standing in line to greet him when he kissed me. He sat me on top of his legs, and he kissed me.

In response Grimaldi told Goodman:

First, I want to say that there is no media organization in the world that has done more to expose sexual abuse by priests than the National Catholic Reporter. That’s number one. We gave our database of abusers to SNAP and Bishop Accountability. That’s why they have a database. So I just wanted to make that point.

Second, I’m from Missouri, Amy. You’ve got to show me. And I think Peter’s a nice man, like Peter a lot. But he’s conflated a number of things. The cases that he’s talking about are horrific. They’re awful. Those priests should be banished from the Catholic Church. We agree on that. No question whatsoever. The question that I don’t have, the evidence that I don’t have — and when I met Peter the other night, I asked him to send it to me. And, in fact, I emailed him the next day, and I said, “Give me that evidence on Prevost,” because he was on our short list. We thought he could become the next pope. And I didn’t get a reply. Now, he’s here in Rome. I didn’t have his card. I sent it through their website. So, it could be that for whatever happened and a million things going on — and I’m running a team of seven people — but I’m still eager to see the evidence, because you’ve got to show me that his fingerprints are on a cover-up, and we don’t have that.

It was the most transparent instance of face-saving gaslighting of survivors one can engage with. Grimaldi had a smugness evincing his own sense of self-importance in the media blitz that has greeted the new Pontiff’s election, a wicked grimace considering the matter under discussion.

Isley, looking ready to go vomit, responded:

Did you hear the victim talking? They did an open letter. Do you know what guts it took to put their names on a letter that they released to the public with their names on it? They’re the ones that said they went to [then-Bishop Robert] Prevost. Let’s see the report Prevost sent. I am talking and believing the victims. Their accounts are completely consistent… Whether you disagree with me or not, that I am a survivor of rape and sexual assault by a priest in the Catholic Church. And what I’m thinking about is that young lady in Peru and her sisters and what they are going through right now, seeing the praise and adulation of this man. He covered up those crimes in Peru. There’s plenty of evidence for an investigation.

He did it in Chicago. This is in court records. He put two priests in residences, one next to a high school, pedophile priest, one next to an elementary school, pedophile priest. He didn’t even tell the parents of those children or the principal of that school, “I’ve got a pedophile priest like 1,000 feet away from your school.” OK? Didn’t do any of that.

So, that’s not the care of children.

Let me make the following argument.

After 25 years of public stigma, shame, and misery on the international stage, maybe the actual test of whether or not Dr. King impacted the new Pontiff will be manifest in how he takes on these allegations that include him being directly implicated. Dr. King was murdered for being such a truth teller.

Will Pope Leo opt for the privileged diplomatic protections as newly-elected monarch of a European micro-state to dodge the heat, as they say on the South Side?

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