'Enthusiasm and joy' in new Pope's hometown of Chicago

Yahoo

09-05-2025

The church where Pope Leo XIV attended mass as a child and served as an altar boy is now an empty shell.
Only the stained glass windows remain intact inside the sturdy facade of St Mary's of the Assumption on the far edge of Chicago's South Side.
The disrepair is one indication of how the Catholic Church's power and influence has been ebbing away in America's big cities.
And yet, around this city there's palpable excitement, particularly among Catholics, that the new pontiff is not only American - he's a South Side Chicagoan.
"When they said the new Pope was an American, I flipped out, I said 'no way'!" said Mary Simons, a French teacher and nearby resident who brought her mother to see St Mary's.
"The Church seems like it's getting smaller and smaller in this country," said Ms Simons. "I'm hoping that this will rejuvenate the church and make it bigger and better."
A small trickle of Catholics, along with a few non-Catholics, made their way to St Mary's on Thursday afternoon as the news spread that Pope Leo XIV – until recently, Cardinal Robert Prevost – had been elected by his fellow cardinals in Rome.
While some lamented over the poor state of the neighbourhood church – "It's shocking to see this" remarked one visitor - several were close to tears as they considered the humble roots of their new leader.
Natalie Payne attended the church and the school associated with it. She hadn't heard the news but just happened to be driving by when she saw the small crowd outside and stopped to take in the moment.
"We loved this school. It was a very family oriented place and very accepting of difference," she said. "I was one of the very few black people who attended this school, but I always felt part of the community. It was just a beautiful place."
Catholics make up about 20% of the US population, according to Pew Research, a number that dropped from 24% at the start of the century. Attendance has fallen and the decline is noticeable in the big industrial cities of the Midwest, in closed schools and shuttered houses of worship like St Mary's.
Leo XIV grew up in a modest home just a few streets away from here. The Chicago Sun-Times reported his parents – his father was a school administrator and his mother a librarian - bought their home in 1949, paying a mortgage of $42 a month.
His father was of French and Italian decent and his mother had Spanish heritage, according to a Vatican news release.
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Charleen Burnette, one of the Pope's former classmates, told the BBC she remembers him as a "quiet, kind, gentle, wicked-smart kid".
"He was always the top of our class, all the time," she said, recalling how he always knew he wanted to be a priest and would stay late to sweep and dust St Mary's as a boy.
"He vocalised it. He lived it. He exemplified it," she said.
In recent years, the Catholic Church has not only weathered declining attendance but also child abuse scandals that continue to resonate today.
The Midwest Augustinians, a religious order in Chicago which Pope Leo once led, only published a list of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse in 2024, after years of public pressure.
As a cardinal, Prevost was criticised after being accused of allowing a priest facing sex abuse allegations to live in an Augustinian building near an elementary school. The priest was later moved and the religious order says it has tried to be transparent.
There is a common feeling here that the church has not fully reckoned with the past but despite that, many Catholics here expressed hope for the new Pope's reign.
Outside Holy Name Cathedral, the centre of the Catholic Church in downtown Chicago, workers were hanging bunting to prepare for a special mass on Friday morning.
Father Gregory Sakowicz, rector of Holy Name, said he was just about to preside over mass at the cathedral when the news broke.
"When I saw the white smoke on TV, I looked out the window and the sun came out here in Chicago," he said.
"Later, during holy communion someone told me, 'Father, the new Pope is Father Robert Prevost from Chicago.' I was shocked."
Fr Sakowicz said Pope Leo XIV "will be his own man" but added that he was confident that he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and be "a voice for human rights, a voice for the voiceless, concerned with the poor, and concerned for our mother Earth".
And in this sport-mad city, there's one question that might nearly match the importance of the new Pope's theological direction – which of the city's baseball teams does he root for?
Although there were some reports that he backs the Chicago Cubs, in interviews the new pope's brother has said he cheers for the White Sox – the team with a passionate South Side fan base. Both teams on X, however, have claimed the new Pope's support.
"Go White Sox - and go Cubs," said Fr Sakowicz. "There's just a lot of enthusiasm and joy around here.
"He might be from Chicago, but he will be a pope for the whole world, not just Chicago, not just the US, not just North America - but the entire world."
With reporting from Nadine Yousif