Pope Leo hung up on by bank while trying to fix customer-service issue

Even Pope Leo XIV was not spared the dead end of a customer-service call. The Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, who became the 267th pope of the Catholic Church when his pontificate began on May 8, 2025, was said to have called a bank in the United States and been hung up on while trying to fix a routine problem.

The episode lands because Leo XIV has been cast, from the start, as both extraordinary and unmistakably American. He is the first American pope, a man from Chicago now leading a church of nearly 1.5 billion Catholics, yet the bank call strips away the pageantry and leaves the same frustration familiar to anyone who has been cut off mid-conversation by a busy line or an automated system.

That tension has helped shape his public image. The Vatican’s documentary “Leo from Chicago” traces the roots of Robert Francis Prevost and includes interviews with his brothers, Louis Prevost and John Prevost, reinforcing the sense that the pope remains tethered to a family and a hometown far from Vatican City. The Holy See has also kept his social-media presence active through the official papal accounts under @Pontifex, which it says reach 52 million followers across nine languages.

For a pontiff whose words travel instantly through those channels, the contrast with the slow machinery of a bank customer-service line is striking. The Holy See’s own contact and press-office listings in Vatican City reflect a carefully layered institution built on formal channels and deliberate access, yet the pope himself still ran into the kind of clipped, ordinary inconvenience that millions of consumers face every day.

That is what gives the story its force. Leo XIV’s call did not diminish his office; it made his public image more legible. A pope can be elected in the Sistine Chapel, command global attention in multiple languages, and still get treated like any other caller who cannot get past the front line. In a media age that often pushes religious leaders toward abstraction, the small indignity of a hung-up call made Leo XIV look, for a moment, less like an untouchable symbol and more like a man trying to get a problem solved.