SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Those who met Pope Leo XIV before his papal appointment are still processing the news of his elevation to the Catholic Church's highest office on Thursday.
Billy Morstad was a senior at St. Augustine High School when Pope Leo XIV visited the school in 2012.
"This is an entryway that Pope Leo XIV would have walked through," Morstad said as he guided us through the school.
Back then, he was Father Robert Prevost and one of many priests who visited that year to help celebrate the school's 90th anniversary.
"There's another Augustinian priest coming to help celebrate the school, and then looking back at it, you're like, oh no, I was in the same room as you know, the head of the Catholic Church," Morstad said.
Now, as the school's alumni relations coordinator, Morstad is still processing the news along with the rest of the campus.
"The emotions are running high, kept getting text messages like, can you believe he's Augustinian? He's Augustinian?" Morstad said.
He's not the only one on campus with a personal connection to the new pope.
Vladimir Bachynsky, a religion teacher at St. Augustine, met Pope Leo at an Augustinian conference in 2010.
"When he got up, he said can I get you a soda something? I said sure, a Coke would be great, and he brought me a Coke," Bachynsky said.
At the time, Pope Leo was the head of the Augustinian Order, but Bachynsky remembers him as humble and unassuming.
"I didn't know it was gonna be Pope Coke, so it tasted great nonetheless," Bachynsky said about the drink brought to him by the now-leader of the Catholic Church.
These personal stories serve as reminders that even the pope shares our humanity.
"Popes are in fact human beings, you know sometimes we like to put them really high up on the throne, but they're ordinary people, they're Christians just like the rest of us," Bachynsky said.
