The Chicken Farmer Pope and the Hidden Path to Authority

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**By Donnie Harold Harris** **Unity Party of Indiana** **May 17, 2026** --- ## The Question Nobody Is Asking On May 8, 2025, the College of Cardinals walked out of the Sistine Chapel and announced the first American pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. His name is Robert Francis Prevost. He took the name Leo XIV. He was 69 years old. Most of the headlines were about his nationality. Chicago-born. South Side. White Sox fan. First American pope. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the question I have been turning over in my mind for two weeks: **How does a man who spent the better part of forty years in dirt-road villages in northern Peru, riding horses through highland communities and burying the dead of subsistence farmers, end up as the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics?** How does a man who could just as easily have been a chicken farmer in this life — by which I mean, a man whose daily work was small, rural, unglamorous, and invisible to the world — end up wearing the Ring of the Fisherman? What are we missing? ## Forty Years in the Villages Here is what Robert Prevost actually did with his life before he became pope. In 1985, at age 29, he was sent to Chulucanas in northern Peru. That same year, devastating El Niño rains had left thousands of people homeless. He arrived in the aftermath. His first work was not theology. It was disaster response. In 1988, he moved to Trujillo and stayed for eleven years. During those eleven years, the **Shining Path** — a Maoist guerrilla movement — terrorized Peruvian cities and controlled entire stretches of countryside. He served as a parish priest in a poor suburb of Trujillo, taught canon law at a seminary, raised money to build that seminary, supervised its construction, and served as judicial vicar of the archdiocese. He worked through one of the most violent periods in modern Latin American history, in places most Americans cannot find on a map. In 2014, after a stretch of years in Chicago leading the Augustinian order worldwide, he went back to Peru — this time to **Chiclayo**, a city in the north — to serve as bishop. He stayed for nine years. During those nine years, he became a Peruvian citizen. He learned to speak Spanish and the Indigenous Quechua language well enough to celebrate Mass in both. There are photographs of him **on horseback visiting villages in the highlands.** There are photographs of him **in rubber boots standing beside flood victims**. There are photographs of him **blessing oxygen generators during the COVID-19 pandemic** as Peru's hospital system collapsed and people drowned on dry land. He responded to a massive Venezuelan migration crisis. He buried priests killed by Shining Path remnants. He sat in dirt-floor homes and ate what was served. He learned the names of children whose parents could do nothing for his career, and remembered them years later. That is forty years of his life. That is the resume. ## What Power Actually Costs Now ask yourself: **What kind of man does that produce?** Not a careerist. A careerist would have stayed in Rome after his canon law degree in 1984. The Vatican has a thousand ambitious young clerics every year who never see a dirt road, who climb the curial ladder rung by rung, who collect titles like trading cards. That is a recognized path. It works. It produces popes. It has produced many popes. Prevost did not take that path. He took the path that goes nowhere on paper. He took the path where the people you serve cannot vote for you, cannot promote you, cannot write nice things about you in newspapers, cannot do anything for you at all. He took the path of small work in small places among small people, and he kept walking it for four decades. And then — and this is the part nobody is paying close enough attention to — the College of Cardinals, in the middle of an institutional crisis over sexual abuse, financial corruption, and shrinking relevance, looked across all the careerists and all the polished diplomats and all the safe candidates, and they picked the man who had spent forty years among people with no power. They did not pick him in spite of those forty years. They picked him **because of** those forty years. That decision is telling us something. We should listen. ## What We Are Missing Here is what we are missing, and I say this as a 72-year-old Hoosier veteran and a leader in the Unity Party of Indiana: **The path to real authority almost never looks like a path to real authority while you are walking it.** Modern American politics has trained us to look for leaders the way we look for celebrities. We expect them to come pre-credentialed. We expect them to have been groomed by donor networks, party bosses, Ivy League alumni offices, and television producers. We expect them to be recognizable before they are ready, and we discard the ones who do not come with the right packaging. Pope Leo XIV is a quiet rebuke to all of that. He was not groomed. He was not packaged. He was not preparing to be pope. He was preparing to be faithful in Chiclayo. The fact that the faithfulness, accumulated over four decades among people the world considered unimportant, eventually produced the highest moral office on the planet — that is the lesson. That is the part the headlines are not telling. **Real authority is forged through service to people with no power.** Not through service to donors. Not through service to bosses. Not through service to constituencies who can return the favor. Through service to the ones who have nothing to give you back except their trust, their hunger, their suffering, and their hope. When you do that work for one year, you change a few lives. When you do it for ten, you change a community. When you do it for forty, you become a different kind of person. And when the world finally needs that kind of person — really needs them, the way the Church needed one in 2025 — the world will find you, whether you were looking for it or not. ## What This Means for Indiana The Unity Party of Indiana is not the Catholic Church. I am not Pope Leo XIV. But the philosophy is the same, and I want to say it plainly. We are not building a party on big donors. We do not have any. We are not building a party on celebrity endorsements. We will not get them. We are not building a party on a media machine that will manufacture our credibility for us. There is no machine. We are building a party the only way a third party in this country has ever actually been built — **village by village, conversation by conversation, faithful service by faithful service, among Hoosiers who have been ignored by both major parties for so long that they have stopped expecting anything different.** That is our Chiclayo. That is our Trujillo. That is our highland village. When we fight to eliminate Indiana's civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, we are doing it for survivors who have no political power and no lobby and no PAC behind them. When we organize around VA reform, we are doing it for veterans who have been told for forty years to wait their turn. When we talk about economic equality and nuclear energy and justice system reform, we are not doing it because there is a donor class that funds those positions. We are doing it because they are the right positions, and somebody has to take them whether the donor class shows up or not. That work does not look like a path to authority. It looks like a path to obscurity. It looks like a path to losing. But Pope Leo XIV walked that path for forty years, and look where he ended up. ## A Word to the Faithful If you are reading this and you are a Hoosier who has been told that your work does not matter — because you are not a senator, not a celebrity, not a media figure, not a millionaire — I want to tell you something the new pope's life is teaching all of us. The work matters. The small work. The unnoticed work. The work in rooms nobody is watching. The work for people who cannot do anything for you. The work that does not photograph well and does not poll well and does not make the evening news. **That is the only work that has ever built anything that lasted.** Empires have been built on power. Movements have been built on attention. But the institutions that have outlasted every empire and every movement — the Church, the constitutional republic when it works, the family, the village, the local hospital, the volunteer fire department, the union hall — have always been built on the patient, faithful, unnoticed work of people who served those with no power. Pope Leo XIV is not the first man to teach this lesson. Saint Augustine taught it. Lincoln taught it. Dorothy Day taught it. The veterans who built the VFW halls in every small town in Indiana taught it. My own VA care team in Indianapolis teaches it every week. But Pope Leo XIV's elevation is a sign — a public, world-historical, undeniable sign — that the lesson is still true in 2026, in a century that does not believe in it anymore. The Chicken Farmer Pope is not a curiosity. He is a confirmation. Keep walking the trail. --- **Donnie Harold Harris is a 72-year-old U.S. veteran, an Indianapolis resident, and a leader with the Unity Party of Indiana. He writes on veterans affairs, justice reform, economic equality, and the philosophy of governance. Contact: bigdonnie57@gmail.com.** --- **Suggested categories/tags for WordPress:** Political Philosophy, Unity Party of Indiana, Leadership, Faith and Politics, Grassroots Reform, Pope Leo XIV **Featured image suggestion:** A photograph of Pope Leo XIV in his episcopal years in Chiclayo — ideally the one of him on horseback visiting highland villages, or in rubber boots beside flood victims. These images are available in the public press archives from May 2025 forward and capture the essay's central thesis at a glance.