Leo XIV

Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost on 14 September 1955 in Chicago, is the head of the Roman Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, elected on 8 May 2025 as the first pope from the United States. A member of the Order of Saint Augustine ordained a priest in Rome in 1982, he spent years as a missionary and bishop in Peru before leading the Augustinian order worldwide and later serving in the Roman Curia, and as pope he holds both the Church's supreme spiritual authority and the temporal sovereignty of Vatican City, a dual role this atlas records under its Theocratic and Religious-Political Leaders placement alongside Iran's clerical successors rather than under an ordinary head-of-state category, a deliberate and disclosed call given the papacy's own unique constitutional shape.