Do you recognize the cleric on the left of this photograph? Of course you do! It’s none other than Pope Leo XIV…before he was Pope Leo XIV. This image as captured back in the summer of 1999 while Father Robert Prevost OSA, now Bishop of Rome, was substituting at Saint Matthew parish in Flint for a week while pastor and good friend, Father Fred Taggart OSA, was away on retreat.
Having their baby daughter, Alaina, baptized were Jim and Mary Skellett. Dad Jim first met Father Prevost at Saint Matthew during the parish’s 75th anniversary celebrations in 1986. Jim then spent six months with Father Prevost at the Augustinian seminary in Chicago before the future Holy Father departed for Peru in order to undertake missionary work. However, the two men have kept in touch in the years since.
"When I first heard that an American from Chicago had been elected pope, I was shocked! I never thought that I would see, in my lifetime, an American elected as Supreme Pontiff. But then to find out, a few days later, that our new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, had visited my parish, Saint Matthew in Flint, the shock only intensified!" says Father Anthony Strouse, the present pastor of Saint Matthew.
"While Pope Leo XIV was never assigned to Saint Matthew during his priesthood, it is a blessing to know that a future pope celebrated Holy Baptism in our beautiful parish church. I suppose it was a similar experience with Saint Peter: here was a humble fisherman from a most unexpected part of the world that God would choose to lead His Church. I’m willing to bet some of the locals in Capernaum also thought about the times they had met him, or fished with him, or went to synagogue with him. And that’s the beauty of our faith: God takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary."
So now you know! God bless the Pope!