Tolkkinen: Fergus Falls priest who studied with Pope Leo says he has good hearing ‘to hear everyone’

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. - In his temporary office in a downtown office suite, Father Lucho Palomino let me try out my broken Spanish.

“I want ... a ... green T-shirt,” I told him, drawing from my recent DuoLingo lesson on shopping. He laughed, brown eyes crinkling. “Bueno español,” he said. It took me a beat to understand so he repeated it in Spanish and then in English. “Good Spanish.”

Father Lucho, as everyone calls him, who joined a trio of Otter Tail County parishes as parish vicar last year, is well loved by people who know him. Recently, they were delighted to learn something else about him — he knows the new pope, Leo XIV.

It’s not just a passing acquaintance, either. For seven years, Pope Leo, then known as Padre Roberto, was his canon law professor at seminary in Trujillo, Peru. While Pope Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, is the first American pope, he is also a naturalized citizen of Peru, Father Lucho’s home country.

Father Lucho’s presence in west-central Minnesota puts parishioners in the farming communities of Elizabeth, Fergus Falls and Pelican Rapids within two degrees of separation of the newest spiritual leader of the world’s estimated 1.4 billion Catholics.

Father Lucho doesn’t have the new pope’s email address or phone number (but could probably get it). But from 1987 to 1994, they lived near each other and interacted daily at the Trujillo, Peru seminary. On desert ground between the Andes Mountains and the South Pacific, parishioners and professors alike raised their own food on some five acres, weeding and harvesting and feeding pigs and chickens.

Most of the 400 students came from poor families, as did Father Lucho, who grew up selling fish door to door from a young age. So they appreciated that the priests, including Padre Roberto, did not hold themselves apart from the local people. They worked just as the local people did for their food; being men of the cloth did not mean they were above them.

Decades later, Father Lucho speaks glowingly of his time there. The professors were as close to the students as actual fathers. The professors were missionaries, many of them from other countries, and their goal was to train Peruvian-born priests to take over. The priests called themselves “spare tires;” the students, they said, would become the main wheels under the Peruvian church.

It was a dangerous time, however, to be a priest in Peru. The Shining Path communist guerilla movement was rising in power and murdering its enemies. In 1991, Shining Path guerillas murdered three priests as “servants of imperialism.” Father Lucho recalls that the bishop gave permission for priests to leave if they felt they were in danger. But nobody did. The Catholic church has a history of martyrdom, and they were willing to die in order to serve their congregations, he said.

This month, Father Lucho was flying home from a visit to his ailing mother in Peru as Catholic cardinals were choosing the successor to Pope Francis, who died in April. He was praying that they would pick his old professor, who had taught in fluent Spanish and who cared about his students.

“He was a very organized, humble guy, very easy to be friends with him,” Father Lucho recalled. “He was a little quiet, but a wise man, and always he has good hearing to hear everyone.”

After Father Lucho landed at the Minneapolis airport, he turned his phone on and was bombarded with messages: White smoke had issued from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. The cardinals had indeed selected his old teacher.

He was happy to hear it, he said. The world badly needs peace, and the new pontiff is a peacemaker. He hopes that Pope Leo can help end conflict in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Father Lucho hasn’t spoken to Pope Leo recently. He last saw him about five years ago at a reunion in Peru.

But he is a symbol of the reach of Pope Leo XIV’s influence. Having learned from him, he has carried biblical teachings of justice and mercy into west-central Minnesota, including sympathy for the poor and for immigrants.

As a Spanish-speaking priest, he has seen up close the misery inflicted by anti-immigration policies. The father of one local family he knows was recently deported to Guatemala, leaving his wife and American-born children with no way to buy food or pay the rent.

West-central Minnesota is not without sympathy for immigrants who arrived without permission. But they are often drowned out by dehumanizing “illegal criminal alien” chants on conservative talk radio and far-right podcasts.

While it’s too soon to know how Pope Leo XIV will address immigration and poverty, Catholic cardinals seem to have chosen a pope in the mold of Pope Francis, a pope whose focus was not on tradition but on mercy and dialogue.

It’s fine for a nation to set and enforce immigration policies. But maybe a new papal message of compassion will temper how we do it.