VATICAN CITY — Once a young teenager wearing a cap and gown for his eighth-grade graduation photo in Chicago, today the famous former-student posed for a reunion picture wearing his papal zucchetto and cassock at the Vatican.
Pope Leo XIV, who graduated from the lower school of St. Mary of the Assumption on the city’s South Side in 1969, greeted and reminisced with 10 of his 82 former classmates after the general audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 18.
“Sorry! I’m nervous,” laughed Sherry Stone (née Blue) after a small sign saying, “God bless you Pope Leo,” slipped from her grasp when she reached out to shake the hand of her former classmate — Robert F. Prevost.
The pope proudly held up their old graduation photo as they posed for another photo together, almost 60 years later.
“Here he is, our friend, the pope,” Jerome Clemens told the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, pointing to the black-and-white image of the 13-year-old Prevost. Clemens then showed the back of the class photo with Prevost’s old autograph and his new one that was signed, “Leo XIV.”
Among the small gifts they brought was the 2025 fall issue of “Air Chicago,” a color magazine
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