Sr. Dianne Bergant, C.S.A., discusses her former student — now Pope Leo XIV — with Chicago Bulls play-by-play announcer Chuck Swirsky at the Archdiocese of Chicago stadium event held June 14. About 30,000 people attended the celebration and Mass held at Rate Field, formerly Comiskey Park, to honor the pope, a Chicago native. (Screenshot from the Archdiocese of Chicago livestream recording.)

If anyone ever has a question about how God threads the Holy Spirit through unexpected ways, just ask Sr. Dianne Bergant, C.S.A.

The West Allis native took the lessons she learned as a child at a West Milwaukee Catholic school and taught similar ones 45 years ago in a graduate-level classroom to an Augustinian seminary student who is now the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV.

“I helped that young man to learn how to interpret the Bible. What do you say to that?” said Sr. Dianne, an accomplished biblical theologian.

“That doesn’t make me a good teacher, but I know I left my mark in his thinking. I am awed by that.”

On June 14, Sr. Dianne — who said she once dreamed of playing center field for the New York Yankees —­ shared her experience about teaching the now-Holy Father at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV’s hometown.

She was one of the speakers before a crowd of 30,000 at the Archdiocese of Chicago event celebrating the selection of Pope Leo held on a stage in center field at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox before a Mass honoring the new pope.

“He was not born with a golden chalice in his hand,” Sr. Dianne said of the man she knew at the time as Robert Prevost, someone who she said had a rather normal Catholic upbringing, one which in some ways was like her own.

Now in her late 80s, Sr. Dianne lives in Fond du Lac where her order, the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, is based.

Sr. Dianne fulfilled one of her other dreams by becoming a member of that religious order, members of which taught at her grade school, St. Florian, in West Milwaukee. She then became a biblical theologian and author, serving as the professor of Old Testament at Catholic Theological Union for 45 years.

Sr. Dianne said her experience entering religious life after high school helped her see what Pope Leo XIV was experiencing while in the seminary.

“I knew him when he was in graduate school. He had already had his first degree (Villanova University outside Philadelphia, an Augustinian university). He already had formation in the Augustinian community,” she said.

“He was a normal young man, serious. He was more mature.”

Sr. Dianne perhaps further influenced that maturity in how she taught the women and men who attended classes with Pope Leo XIV, and in the many years after she began at CTU in 1978.

“There’s something else that I frequently say at the beginning of a class. I would say, ‘You’re going to work hard in this class. Not because I’m a hard teacher, though I could be. Not because it’s hard material, though it might be. You’re going to work hard in this class because the people of God deserve the best that you can give,’” she says.

“I’m handing down to you what has been handed down to me, so that you can hand it down to others. And we never hand it down the same way as we received it, because we leave our mark on it.”

Pope Leo XIV has already left his mark in the first few months of his papacy, just as he has in so many others during the 40-plus years since Sr. Dianne taught him.

“It happens through his personality,” she said about how he hands down the lessons of the faith in his unique way.

“I remember the day that he spoke to journalists and he talked about how important it is to be speaking the truth. This is a highly intelligent man. This is somebody who has learned from his experience of life. In a very real sense, his brothers made him a leader because of the way he responded to them.”

When Sr. Dianne sits back and takes in how she helped mold that leadership through the lessons she taught him at CTU, gratitude comes her way.

“It’s not that we have accomplished something, whether that be reaching a jubilee within a religious order or being appointed to be a cardinal or elected to be a pope,” she said.

“It’s God that has accomplished it. We experience it as our accomplishment, but it’s God’s.”