The unassuming parish where a future pope was once an altar boy
Chicago: On a sunny Friday morning the day after Pope Leo XIV was crowned, Terri Crowley and her husband, John, drove an hour across the city to take a look at the pope's childhood church.
St Mary of the Assumption Church in Riverdale, on Chicago's south side, is a shell of its former self, having closed in 2011. There is debris and glass littering the floor, graffiti on the walls and a gaping hole in the roof.
But this unassuming parish in an unloved part of town is where the new leader of the Catholic Church sang in the choir, served as an altar boy and attended school.
'We're truly blessed. Words can't describe it,' Terri said of the home town hero's rise. 'It was really amazing to see he had dual citizenship, too. We really appreciated that – that he had a global perspective on everything.'
The Crowleys get around a lot themselves: often to Australia. As it turns out – purely by coincidence – Terri's nephew is Mason Cox, the 211-centimetre, Texas-born ruckman for the ladder-leading Collingwood Football Club. They've visited Melbourne to see him play.
Sport is religion in Chicago. The biggest question locals had once Cardinal Robert Prevost became the new pope was which major league baseball team he supported: the Cubs or the White Sox. The Cubs shared a social media post proudly claiming him as one of theirs; his brother John quickly corrected the record.
'Whoever said Cubs on the radio got it wrong. It's Sox,' he told NBC Chicago. And on the scoreboard at the White Sox's home ground, punters attending a game against the Miami Marlins on Friday night were greeted by a large billboard congratulating 'the south side's very own Pope Leo XIV'.
The Pope's baseball allegiance was even a topic of speculation at a special morning Mass inside the ornate Holy Name Cathedral, the seat of the archbishop of Chicago, which was rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
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