The head of the Dominican Order on Monday, May 12, welcomed the election of Pope Leo XIV, citing the outcome of last week’s conclave as a point of unity in the Catholic Church.
Pope Leo XIV, elected on May 8, is the first pope from the United States and the first from the Order of St. Augustine (OSA).
There’s one reason for Dominicans to cheer: the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, is an alumnus of the order’s famed Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, where the new pope finished his canon law doctorate in 1987. Also an alumnus is Pope St. John Paul II, who finished his doctorate in philosophy in the “Angelicum.”
Prevost, in fact, was scheduled to close the Angelicum’s academic year had the conclave and his subsequent election to the papacy not intervened.
Fr. Gerard Francisco Timoner, O.P., the first Filipino master of the Order of Preachers, stressed that preferences or affinities should not really matter in the process of choosing the successor of St. Peter.
“Everybody has his own preference, but once he went out [of the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica], we’re just so happy we have a pope. He is Peter,” he said in an interview.
“And that’s the beauty of the Catholic Church,” he added.
Founded in 1216 by St. Dominic de Guzman, the Dominicans adopted the Rule of St. Augustine.
The future Pope Leo XIV served as prior of the Augustinian province in Chicago from 1999 to 2013 and was then twice elected to lead the OSA. He became the bishop of Chiclayo, Peru in 2014 and cardinal and prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops in 2023.
Connecting with his roots, the pope was photographed on May 10 with fellow Augustinians at their shrine in Genazzano outside Rome, before a painting of Pope Leo XIII being crowned with a wreath by the Blessed Mother in the presence of Saints Dominic and Francis and Saints Augustine and Monica of Hippo.
The Dominicans counted five of their own in the conclave that elected Leo XIV: two friars and three members of priestly fraternities or clerical associations of St. Dominic.
The two friar-cardinals, the English Dominican Fr. Timothy Radcliffe and Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco of Algiers, lodged at the Dominican convent of Santa Sabina in Rome before and after the conclave.
The other Dominican cardinals in the 2025 conclave were Francis Leo, archbishop of Toronto, Canada; José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education; and José Fuerte Advíncula, archbishop of Manila.
Including the three cardinals, the Priestly Fraternities of St. Dominic have 485 members from diocesan clergy worldwide, according to Fr. Florentino Bolo, O.P., the socius for apostolic life.
The Dominicans welcome the pope at Santa Sabina at least once a year. The pontiff traditionally leads Ash Wednesday Mass at the oldest existing basilica in Rome, which serves as the first Lenten station church.
