What Happened When the Pope Had to Call Customer Service

CHICAGO — Even the Vicar of Christ can be thwarted by a customer service representative.

About two months after Robert Francis Prevost, a Chicago-born cardinal, became Pope Leo XIV in Vatican City, he put in a call to his bank back home, a close friend, the Rev. Tom McCarthy, told a gathering of Catholics in Naperville, Illinois, last week.

The new pope identified himself as Robert Prevost, saying that he wished to change the phone number and address that the bank had on file, McCarthy said.

The pope dutifully answered the security questions correctly.

Then, the woman on the line for the bank told him that it wasn’t enough — he would have to come to the branch in person.

“He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” McCarthy said in a video clip shared on social media, recounting the new pope’s growing frustration as the audience laughed. “I gave you all the security questions.”

The bank employee apologized. The pope tried a different tack.

“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked, according to McCarthy.

She hung up.

Even while leading more than 1 billion Catholics around the world and living in gilded splendor amid priceless works of art, popes can sometimes be entangled in the mundane, both accidentally and with purpose. In the first 24 hours of Pope Francis’ papacy in 2013, he insisted on paying his own hotel bill and collecting his own luggage, a gesture of humility to Catholic clergy.

Leo rose from modest roots in Dolton, Illinois, a small suburb just outside Chicago, before serving as a bishop in Peru and in an influential post at the Vatican when he was elected pope nearly one year ago.

McCarthy confirmed in an email that the story about the bank hassle was true. He had been telling a group of Catholics about his friendship with Leo at an educational meeting geared toward men and boys at a Naperville church.

The priest is a well-known figure among Catholics on the South Side, an Augustinian and leader at St. Rita of Cascia High School. He first met Leo in the 1980s in Chicago, where they grew up in similar working-class neighborhoods in the city and its close suburbs, and has visited the pope at the Vatican.

A spokesperson for the Vatican did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the bank episode.

The matter was sorted out thanks to the intervention of another priest who had a connection to the bank president, McCarthy said.

There was no word on the customer service representative who had cut off her call with the bank’s most famous customer.

“Could you imagine being known as the woman who hung up on the pope?” McCarthy said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Julie Bosman/Diego Ibarra Sánchez
c. 2026 The New York Times Company

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