(Left to right) Donna Sauer Miller; Diane Barr, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Baltimore; Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the future Pope Leo XIV; and Fr. Patrick Cooney, OSB, judicial vicar of the Diocese of Owensboro, are seen during the Feb. 28, 2025 visit of the Canon Law Society of America delegates’ visit to the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome. Cardinal Prevost was serving at the time as the prefect for the dicastery. COURTESY OF DONNA SAUER MILLER

Henderson native recalls meeting future Pope Leo XIV

BY ELIZABETH WONG BARNSTEAD, THE WESTERN KENTUCKY CATHOLIC

When Pope Leo XIV walked out onto the balcony on May 8 to greet the world shortly after his election as the 267th bishop of Rome, Donna Sauer Miller burst into tears.

“An Italian woman was patting me on the back, asking ‘famiglia?’” said Miller, who explained through her tears, that no, he was not a family member, but that the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was an American like herself.

“Cardinal Prevost wasn’t in the front of my mind,” Miller, a Henderson, Ky., native, said in a May 14 phone call with The Western Kentucky Catholic.

Miller, the executive coordinator of the Canon Law Society of America, and several colleagues, had met with the American cardinal just a few months earlier during their biennial visit to Rome. During their visits, they meet with many of the Roman Curia’s dicasteries (offices), such as the Dicastery for Bishops – of which Cardinal Prevost was the prefect.

They met with his dicastery on Friday, Feb. 28.

Miller said she and Fr. Patrick Cooney, OSB, the president of the Canon Law Society of America and judicial vicar for the Diocese of Owensboro, Ky., and Diane Barr, the vice president of the society and chancellor for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, spoke with Cardinal Prevost for nearly an hour.

“He is a canon lawyer, so we talked shop with him,” she said, adding that their topics included synodality and episcopal conferences. “I found him to be very humble, receptive and open.”

On the group’s way out of the dicastery – Cardinal Prevost personally escorted them – they encountered a Vatican official who only spoke Italian. The multilingual future pope translated for them, since he speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese.

After he saw them off, Miller told her colleagues, “I think he’d be an amazing pope!”

But she and her colleagues reasoned that an American pope was impossible, and, with Pope Francis being hospitalized at the time, they focused rather on praying for his recovery instead of theoretical conclaves.

Donna Sauer Miller and her husband, Rick Miller, take a selfie on May 8, 2025 in the midst of the crowd in St. Peter’s Square celebrating the election of Pope Leo XIV. COURTESY OF DONNA SAUER MILLER

Several months later, Miller was scheduled to return to Rome to participate in a symposium with Australian Catholic University, for which she had helped write a paper for a project titled “Inclusive Governance in a Synodal Church.”

Her husband, Rick Miller, joined her, and the two planned to spend some vacation time in Rome after the symposium. They were set to fly out on Thursday, April 24. But that Monday, April 21, they learned Pope Francis had died.

The symposium was still set to take place, and so the Millers traveled to Rome as planned. They arrived around noon on Friday and were able to pay their respects to Pope Francis lying in state.

After the symposium concluded, the two spent several days touring Rome – and hoping that perhaps a new pope might be elected prior to their May 10 departure.

On May 7, they went on what is known as the Scavi tour, which is the tour of the excavations of the necropolis beneath St. Peter’s Basilica and the tomb of St. Peter himself. Theirs was booked for 3:30 in the afternoon, and as their small tour group assembled, “we could see the cardinals in red walking across to enter the conclave!” said Miller.

The tour culminated around 4:15 p.m., and as they stood at the tomb of St. Peter, “we knelt down and prayed for the cardinals,” she said.

The following day, Miller and her husband had lunch with a fellow symposium participant, Msgr. Anthony Onyemuche Ekpo, the undersecretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. During lunch they discussed the conclave, and even Cardinal Prevost, but agreed that his election seemed unlikely.

Then, after the Millers returned to their vacation rental that afternoon, their phones began lighting up.

“White smoke!” their stateside friends and family texted.

They ran out of their apartment toward St. Peter’s Square and joined “the massive surge of people scrunched together,” said Miller.

Standing where they could see the window with the familiar red curtains, Miller said they started seeing cardinals step out on the balcony.

“The red curtains started moving; people cheered,” she said. Then they heard Cardinal Protodeacon Dominique Mamberti state, “Habemus papam (We have a pope).”

As he spoke in Latin, Miller heard “Robertum Franciscum” and thought, “Oh my gosh, I think it’s Cardinal Prevost.”

But, she thought, this could not be – until he stepped out on the balcony and she recognized him immediately.

“I think the Holy Spirit was smiling down on us,” said Miller. “We were at the right place at the right time, so to speak. We were blessed to be where we were. It’s kind of cool to say we met him.”

She said that in retrospect, “it made sense because in the Dicastery for Bishops, that’s their go-to person,” meaning all the cardinals would have known him because of his role in selecting new bishops.

On their final evening in Rome, Miller and her husband walked to St. Peter’s Square to sit in the peaceful stillness of Rome at night: “It was so peaceful… it was an emotionally draining two weeks, but this was a nice way to end it.”

“It was a blessing to be there and experience that,” she said. “I have a lot of hope. I feel good about this.”

Rick Miller holds up a copy of L’Osservatore Romano, the daily newspaper of Vatican City, with the front page proclaiming the May 8, 2025 election of Pope Leo XIV. He and his wife, Donna Sauer Miller, were among those present in St. Peter’s Square when the new pope was elected and announced. COURTESY OF DONNA SAUER MILLER