Pope's Childhood in a Changing Chicago Tells a Story of Catholic America

New York Times

10-05-2025

Before he was Pope Leo XIV, or even Father Bob, he was the youngest of the three Prevost boys in the pews at St. Mary of the Assumption Parish on the far edge of Chicago's southern border.
The parish was bustling when the future pope and his family were parishioners there in the 1950s and '60s. All three brothers attended elementary school at the parish school. Their mother, Mildred, was the president of the St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society, and performed in plays there, according to Noelle Neis, who remembers sitting behind the family on Sunday mornings.
'They were always there,' Ms. Neis said, adding, 'The community revolved around the church.'
Today, the old Catholic enclave on the South Side of Chicago has essentially disappeared, with institutions shuttered and parishioners dispersing into the suburbs. Attendance at St. Mary of the Assumption declined dramatically over the years, and the congregation merged with another dwindling parish in 2011. The combined parish merged with another two churches in 2019. The old St. Mary building has fallen into disrepair, with graffiti scrawled behind the altar.
That transformation is in many ways the story of Catholicism in America, as changes in urban and suburban landscapes crashed into demographic and cultural shifts that radically reshaped many Catholic communities.
'It's one of the great dramas of 20th century U.S. history,' said John McGreevy, a historian at the University of Notre Dame and the author of 'Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter With Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North.'
Because Catholic dioceses invested so heavily in their physical infrastructure, including church buildings and schools, white Catholics often stayed longer in their neighborhoods than white residents who fled when Black people began to move in the mid-20th century.
'Catholic parishes were neighborhood anchors in ways that no white Protestant or white Jewish institution was,' Dr. McGreevy said. 'When Catholics of a certain generation were asked, 'Where are you from?' They would say, 'I'm from St. Barnabas,' 'I'm from Holy Name.''
Even in many changing Catholic neighborhoods, white residents eventually moved out.
But in the booming days of postwar Chicago, Catholic families like the Prevosts clustered together, attending the same parishes, schools and social events.
'The South Side of Chicago, especially back then, was very family-oriented, very Catholic,' said the Rev. Tom McCarthy, who first met Pope Leo in Chicago in the 1980s.
Father McCarthy, who grew up in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the South Side, said it was unusual not to be Catholic in the area where the pope grew up.
'I only knew one family who wasn't Catholic,' he said. 'You went to Catholic schools, you stayed in the neighborhood, you worked hard, and I think he's a product of that.'
Pope Leo XIV, of course, did not stay in the neighborhood. He enrolled at St. Augustine Seminary High School near Holland, Mich., a boarding school for boys. And as he ascended through the Catholic hierarchy, he lived abroad for long stretches, in Peru and Italy.
Chicago's South Side was solidly working class during Pope Leo's childhood, said Rob Paral, a researcher at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago. The family attended a South Side church, but they lived in Dolton, a suburb just past the city line.
'It is so far away from the privileged suburbs of the north and west Chicago area,' Mr. Paral said. 'He is really from the grit and the real Chicago, which these days is exemplified as much by the southern suburbs as it is by anything in the city.'
The area can be described partly by what it is not, Mr. Paral said. 'It's not pretty, not leafy,' he said. 'You're talking about highways and industry and railroad tracks.'
Donna Sagna, 50, has lived next door to the pope's childhood home for about eight years, she said, during a period that has sometimes been troubled for the block.
She said she had seen drugs being sold near the pope's former house. People moved frequently, Ms. Sagna said, often to escape the violence and crime in the neighborhood. She said she knew of no one who still lived on the block since the Prevost family days.
The neighborhood has felt calmer in recent years, she said, and she is thrilled to be living next door to a house with a suddenly notable history.
'I'm hoping this will bring some peace to the community,' Ms. Sagna said.
The pope's childhood parish, St. Mary of the Assumption, had grown rapidly in the decades before Leo was born, outgrowing two buildings and moving into a third that opened in 1957, when the future pope was a toddler. The church remained busy and active through the following decades, according to interviews and church records.
But the building had structural problems, and attendance started to decline. In 2011, the archbishop of Chicago at the time, Cardinal Francis George, wrote that the building 'is in such a state of poor repair that it is not safe to use.'
He combined St. Mary of the Assumption with a nearby parish and ordered the building closed because the area 'is so economically depressed and the Catholic population in the area is so small that there are insufficient resources to repair the church.'
Many of the Catholic institutions that the Prevost family was connected to met similar fates. Mendel Catholic High School, where the pope's mother worked as a librarian and his brothers went to high school, closed in 1988. The elementary school in the South suburb of Chicago Heights where his father served as principal shuttered two years later.
The number of parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago declined to 216 by 2024, from 445 in the mid-1970s.
In Dolton, 94 percent of residents were white and 2 percent were Black in 1980. By the 2010 census, 5 percent of Dolton residents were white and 90 percent were Black.
Pope Leo's mother died in 1990. His father, Louis, sold the family home in Dolton in 1996 after almost 50 years, according to county records. He died the next year.
The pope's childhood home, a modest brick house on a well-kept block in Dolton, sold last year for $66,000, according to property records. It was recently refurbished and listed against for $199,000. (This week, the real estate broker managing the sale pulled it off the market to consider raising the price.)
Marie Nowling, 86, who lives four houses away, described the neighborhood as quiet. She moved into her house in 1999.
'When I moved here it was wild, a lot of gangs,' Ms. Nowling said. 'But it's a quiet, nice neighborhood now.'