Big day in the Windy City: Chicago celebrates one of their own becoming Pope
THE CITY OF Chicago is celebrating the election of Robert Francis Prevost, a Chicagoan himself, as the new head of the Catholic Church.
The former cardinal was announced as the new Pope yesterday evening, taking on the pontifical name of Pope Leo XIV.
The new Pope was born in Chicago in the US state of Illinois. He attended school in the Chicago suburbs and a studied for a Master of Divinity from the Catholic Technological Union graduate school in Chicago, during which time he also worked as a physics and maths teacher at a high school in the city.
He spent the following decades split between Chicago and Peru, where he became a citizen in 2015 and where locals have also been celebrating his appointment.
Bells rang out at the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago after Robert Francis Prevost was announced as Pope Leo XIV
Alamy
Alamy
The new pope's older brother, John Prevost, has said that he is 'tremendously proud' of his brother.
Advertisement
'Did he want this? Not at all. The responsibility, it's heavy. It's heavy on your shoulders,' John said in an
interview with WGN
, a Chicago television station.
'I think being the first one from North America, being the first American, people are going to be watching … I don't think he wants that horrible responsibility. It's a great honor, but look what he has to uphold,' John said.
He told WGN that they had discussed papal names on Tuesday while they were playing online games together (Words with Friends and Wordle).
'He mentioned Leo. I said, 'Well, don't be Leo, because you wouldn't you be Leo the 13th, and that would be unlucky.' So he did his research, and it was Leo the 14th, and that's what it came,' Robert said.
He said his brother will be guided by his years working in Peru: 'He got to see the other side of the world, the poor and impoverished… I think as Christians, isn't that what we're supposed to do is look out for that group of people that are forgotten?'
In an interview with ABC News, Robert said that when the brothers were young children, a neighbour said she believed Robert would become the first Pope from the US.
When Robert Prevost was in the first grade, his neighbor told him he would be the first American pope, his brother told ABC News' Alex Perez.
On Thursday, that prophecy came true, when Prevost was elected to be the 267th pontiff, the first from the U.S.
https://t.co/GzWHi5FXNj
pic.twitter.com/5NtDkThn0T
— ABC News (@ABC)
May 9, 2025
The governor of Illinois JB Pritzker called Pope Leo XIV's appointment 'historic'.
Related Reads
Pope Leo to hold a first mass as pontiff that will be scrutinised by Catholics and world leaders
'Did he just say Prevost?': St Peter's Square stunned by first American Pope, Leo XIV
'Pope Leo XIV ushers in a new chapter that I join those in our state welcoming in at a time when we need compassion, unity, and peace,' he said.
Former classmate Nadia Weer
told ABC News
that the new Pope was so devout and studious in school that his nickname was 'Father Robert', adding that they 'always assumed he would be a priest'.
'I'm really proud of him. You like people to be successful when they deserve it. And Robert does deserve it.'
Wrigley Field baseball park, the home turf of the Chicago Cubs, has displayed the message: 'Hey Chicago. He's a Cubs fan!'
(John Prevost has poured cold water on that, though; apparently the new Pope is a White Sox supporter.)
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wrote on social media: 'Congratulations to the first American Pope Leo XIV! We hope to welcome you back home soon.'
'Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago!' Johnson said.
Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article.
Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.
Learn More
Support The Journal
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Examiner
2 days ago
- Irish Examiner
'After 10 decades of life, you need to be matter-of-fact about death'
Jennifer Sleeman, aged 95, is so matter-of-fact about death that she had a coffin made for herself several years ago. She asked the man who carved her kitchen table if he would make one and when, a little surprised, he agreed, she lay down on the rug in her sitting-room to be measured up. 'We all die and I think it's sad that we don't talk about death,' she says with a gentle, disarming pragmatism that runs through all of her conversations on the subject. Jennifer Sleeman. In the 10 decades since her birth on September 23, 1929, she has been a dairy farmer, a pre-marriage counsellor, an environmental campaigner, a Green Party candidate, a Fair Trade activist, and, more recently, an advocate for women priests and a more open attitude to death. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family. And there have been a few — in a podcast with her son Andrew (Fr Simon) Sleeman, the Mindful Monk at Glenstal Abbey, with artist Sheelagh Broderick, outlining her funeral playlist (it includes Ol' Man River sung by Paul Robeson), and with her grandson Paul Power who made a beautiful short film entitled For When I Die (2018), as well as the words that are written on the folder containing all her post-death arrangements. There are shots of the aforementioned coffin, standing tall in a bedroom in her home in Clonakilty, 'waiting patiently for me', as she casually puts it. HISTORY HUB If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading Jennifer is neither sentimental nor mawkish; she is simply articulating 'some of the messages she wants to get out there'. In essence, that death is inevitable and we should try to prepare for what she terms a 'good death', one with family around and everything in order, rather than her mother's 'very bad death', which still upsets her. Mother and daughter had words the night before she died and they never had a chance to make it up. 'I could cry about it now. It was just so sad and in a way, I kind of blame myself because for most of my life I did what my mother told me. I was a good daughter. And if I had spoken up a bit more about my own needs and my own thoughts, perhaps the end might have been better,' she says in For When I Die. The need to speak up is a theme that runs through Jennifer Sleeman's extraordinary life. Just eight years before, on the eve of her 81st birthday, she made international headlines when she called for a single-Sunday boycott of Mass to protest about the lack of roles for women in the Catholic Church. Jennifer Sleeman in Ireland in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family If people didn't want to skip Mass, they were asked to attend wearing a green ribbon to let the powers-that-be know that women were no longer happy to be second-class citizens. The letters and phone calls of support, which came from men and women in Ireland, Australia, the US, and Canada, vastly outnumbered the disapproving ones. Jennifer still relishes the attention, and laughs heartily when she recalls having to turn down one interview request because she was already booked to talk to the BBC. Ask if she thinks the Church is changing and she mentions that interfaith minister, Rev. Dr Nóirín Ní Riain visited her yesterday. 'She's almost a priest.' Jennifer Sleeman is in a nursing home now — 'one of the annoying things is that I spend all my time in bed. I'm just old' — and is slightly bemused that anyone would be interested in her life. But what a life. In the 10 decades since her birth on September 23, 1929, she has been a dairy farmer, a pre-marriage counsellor, an environmental campaigner, a Green Party candidate, a Fair Trade activist, and, more recently, an advocate for women priests and a more open attitude to death. Jennifer Sleeman. All she wanted to be as a child growing up in South Africa was a cowboy. She is also a mother of six — Andrew, Duncan, Paddy, Mary, Katey and Patricia (aka Bushy) — which she considers her greatest achievement. That short summary of her life to date shows that she has lived her own philosophy: 'I don't want them to say she died at such and such an age, rather that she lived until she was that age.' All she wanted to be as a child growing up in South Africa was a cowboy, she says, recalling the long pony rides with her sister Alix when they were almost too young to be let wander alone. But then, in a fascinating account of her early life, she writes about how safe and idyllic life was on the fruit farm run by her parents, Loïs and James Graham, a royal navy reservist. It 'was laid out in orchards of fruit trees, apples, pears, and peaches and there were two nectarine trees and [a] cherry [tree] on which we gorged when they were ripe … I can't remember lessons being very onerous. We swam in the water tanks used for irrigating, we rode, we looked after our animals, our clothes were minimal, one dress, shorts, jodhpurs, and for the winter, yellow polo-neck pullovers.' All that changed when the Second World War broke out. Jennifer Sleeman in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family Jennifer's father was recalled to the navy and the family returned to her mother's native Scotland, counterintuitively moving nearer the fighting rather than farther away. The 10-year-old Jennifer didn't see it that way, though. Some eight decades later, it is quite something to hear her talk with glee about the excitement of sailing back to Dumfries through 'submarine-infested waters', to use her evocative phrase. She joins her hands to evoke the prayers she and her sister said on the journey: 'Each night, we ended our prayers with, 'and please God let us be torpedoed.' We thought that would be great fun. Mum was wise enough not to disabuse us of the notion.' In any case, their mum had knitted red, white, and blue bobbles for their hats, which they thought would keep them safe if they found themselves bobbing in the waves. It wasn't long before the harsh reality of war dawned with a jolt: 'I have vivid memories of being taken to see the army coming home from Dunkirk. Lorry after lorry of exhausted soldiers, we stood on the dusty roadside and waved, and mum told us never to forget seeing the soldiers coming home. I haven't,' Jennifer later wrote. Jennifer Sleeman at her wedding to Brian Sleeman in 1949. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family Little did she know then that, nine years later, she would marry one of the soldiers who didn't make it home. Her future husband, lieutenant-colonel Richard Brian Sleeman, of the royal sussex regiment, was captured in Dunkirk and spent the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, along with captain Harry Freeman Jackson, from Mallow in Co Cork. That friendship explained how the couple later ended up in Ireland — Jennifer now thinks of herself as Irish — but we are getting ahead of the story. After the war, in 1949, Jennifer married Brian Sleeman and moved to Berlin where he was secretary to the general of the Allied sector (British, French, and American) in a divided, bombed-out city. Jennifer is looking at her album of photographs explaining the political context because, as she says, her grandchildren don't know that Berlin was divided between the Allies. There are photographs of some of the streets reduced to rubble and while she didn't see the worst of the devastation in the city centre, she met some of the women who were victims of the mass rape perpetrated by Soviets on tens of thousands of German women. Jennifer's uncle, a linguist, had stayed with two women in Berlin before the war and, against advice, she snuck out to visit them. She found them living in a tiny flat and heard that they had been raped by the Russians. 'I felt awfully sorry for them.' She feared for the women's safety and for the young girl who was living with them. At times, she worried for her own safety too. 'I used to feel a bit afraid. What if the Russians just walked in, there was absolutely nothing to stop them coming in from their sector of Berlin,' she says. Damage in post-war Berlin. She lived there with her husband for two years after the war. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family It didn't happen, though, and those post-war years also hold more amusing memories, such as the time the German gardener dug up everything they had planted in their garden and replanted it in rows. For a woman who later spent many happy hours gardening without gloves so that she could feel the dirt under her fingernails, that particular anecdote still sends her into hoots of laughter. 'You couldn't believe that, but it's true,' she says. Berlin is also associated with the happy arrival of the couple's first son, Andrew. Two more sons followed. Duncan was born in South Africa and Paddy in England before the couple acted on captain Freeman-Jackson's invitation to move to Ireland, where they developed a dairy farm, Killuragh Glen, in Killavullen in Cork in the 1950s. Jennifer Sleeman in 1943. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family Three more children arrived, Mary, Katey, and Patricia, and Jennifer Sleeman embraced her new life as mother and dairy farmer, milking cows. 'I loved that. I think I was quite good at it too,' she says. Even now, she looks out the window on these lovely summer mornings and remembers how lovely it was going to get the cows in all those years ago. The conversation continues, going forward and back over Jennifer Sleeman's 'long, happy, busy life', as she describes it. There were hard, sad days too. One of the hardest things, she says, was watching her husband suffer with Alzheimer's disease. She converted to Catholicism in the 1960s after meeting a nice priest. She had also seen the comfort her husband's faith gave him. Jennifer Sleeman skiing in Germany in the 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family. Solace for her, however, came later when she was able to talk to another woman, Margaret, whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer's. 'She always said I was such a help to her. Unless you've been there, you cannot understand it.' Unbidden, another memory resurfaces; the time she missed the only bus to Dumfries during the petrol-rationed days of war and was forced to walk the seven miles home in gathering darkness. 'I remember some kind, kind woman — the people you never forget — came on her bicycle. She got off and walked with me. That's the sort of thing you remember forever. You really do.' After her husband died in 1988, Jennifer moved to Clonakilty where she built a house. 'That was interesting because they don't expect women to build houses. I said to the builder, 'If you make a good job, I'll tell everybody. And if you make a bad job, I'll tell everybody too.' Well, you know, he did a good job.' Jennifer Sleeman: 'I don't want them to say she died at such and such an age, rather that she lived until she was that age.' She went on to have several more 'incarnations'. At a time of life when many slow down, she did the opposite and began a new career as a pre-marriage counsellor, using her free travel pass to go around the country giving courses, and later training the trainers. She also got deeply involved in the Fairtrade movement after her daughter Patricia visited Nicaragua in 2001 and saw how much trading based on transparency and respect benefitted local communities. After attending a 'Food We Buy' conference run by North Cork Organic Group, Jennifer started a Fairtrade campaign at her own kitchen table in Clonakilty, with the help of Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin, of Sinn Féin, Canon Ian Jonas, Church of Ireland minister, and the late Fr Ger Galvin, a Catholic priest. Again, she used her free travel to visit towns and villages all over the country to encourage support for farmers in the developing world, and to raise awareness of the devastating effects of climate change. In 2007, she was named the Cork Environmental Forum Outstanding Individual for her work. On a personal level, she got immense pleasure from the natural environment and worked in her own garden into her late 80s. Jennifer Sleeman has a gentle, disarming pragmatism that runs through all of her conversations on the subject of death. The oak trees growing in it tell a poignant story about the lasting scars of war. Jennifer lost a cousin and two uncles in the Second World War. One of them, her uncle John, was shot down over the Netherlands, and many years later she visited his burial place in Velp with her sister Alix. 'I picked up sprouting acorns on the path outside the graveyard and hid them at the bottom of my bag. They are now the oak trees growing in my garden in Clonakilty and to my delight I have found that they have had 'babies', little saplings which have an interesting history.' Speaking of interesting histories, we have only scratched the surface of the life of a woman who has seen and done so much. She says the width of life is more important than the length but she has clearly had both in hers, even if she doesn't always see the point in talking about it: 'How can you listen to me yapping on?' With the greatest pleasure and ease, though we are sadly running out of space. I ask for a piece of advice she might have given her younger self: 'Don't be afraid to speak up and do what you want to do in life.'
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Irish Examiner
Veterans attend Normandy commemorations on 81st anniversary of D-Day
Veterans gathered in Normandy on Friday to mark the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings – a pivotal moment of the Second World War that eventually led to the collapse of Adolf Hitler's regime. Along the coastline and near the D-Day landing beaches, tens of thousands of onlookers attended the commemorations, which included parachute jumps, flyovers, remembrance ceremonies, parades and historical re-enactments. Many were there to cheer the ever-dwindling number of surviving veterans in their late 90s and older. All remembered the thousands who died. US defence secretary Pete Hegseth commemorated the anniversary of the D-Day landings, in which American soldiers played a leading role, with veterans at the American cemetery overlooking the shore in the village of Colleville-sur-Mer. US defence secretary Pete Hegseth lays a wreath of flowers during the ceremony in Colleville-sur-Mer (Thomas Padilla/AP/PA) The June 6 1944 invasion of Nazi-occupied France used the largest-ever armada of ships, troops, planes and vehicles to breach Hitler's defences in western Europe. A total of 4,414 Allied troops were killed on D-Day itself. In the ensuing Battle of Normandy, 73,000 Allied forces were killed and 153,000 wounded. The battle – and especially Allied bombings of French villages and cities – killed around 20,000 French civilians between June and August 1944. The exact German casualties are unknown but historians estimate between 4,000 and 9,000 men were killed, wounded or missing during the D-Day invasion alone. 'The heroism, honour and sacrifice of the Allied forces on D-Day will always resonate with the US armed forces and our allies and partners across Europe,' said Lieutenant General Jason T Hinds, deputy commander of US Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa. Guests attend the ceremony at the US cemetery (Thomas Padilla/AP/PA) 'Let us remember those who flew and fell. Let us honour those who survived and came home to build a better world. 'Let us ensure that their sacrifice was not in vain by meeting today's challenges with the same resolve, the same clarity of purpose and the same commitment to freedom.' Nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed on D-Day. Of those, 73,000 were from the United States and 83,000 from Britain and Canada. Forces from several other countries were also involved, including French troops fighting with General Charles de Gaulle. The Allies faced around 50,000 German forces. More than two million Allied soldiers, sailors, pilots, medics and other people from a dozen countries were involved in the overall Operation Overlord, the battle to wrest western France from Nazi control that started on D-Day.
Extra.ie
4 days ago
- Extra.ie
Garron Noone leaves fans baffled after claiming he's actually American
Garron Noone has left the internet perplexed with his latest video. The Irish TikToker recently made a video impersonating an American father disciplining his son, with many perplexed by how convincing his accent was. Seeing an opportunity to mess with his audience, the musician and comedian shared another clip claiming he was actually American and that Garron was a character he had cooked up for online content. Garron Noone has left the internet perplexed with his latest video. Pic: RTÉ While folks at home could identify the Mayo man's joke, his fans across the sea were left more than a little confused by the claims. 'So a lot of people don't seem to know this if they haven't been on my page a long time, but Garron is a character that I developed, I think it was around 2020,' he joked. 'I just had this idea for just this humble West of Ireland guy, you know? He's angry about everything….I just thought he was this unlikely character and I just really connected with the idea,' he continued in the almost effortless US accent. @garron_music ♬ original sound – Garron Noone While Garron was unable to keep a straight face in the video, many still took to the comments, confused by his claims. 'Right.. now my brain hurts because I don't know if your American or Irish,' one user wrote. 'I low-key can't even tell if this is real or not like are you Irish or are you American? Which one are you?,' another penned. The Irish TikToker recently made a video impersonating an American father disciplining his son, with many perplexed by how convincing his accent was. Pic: Instagram 'It's too late at night to decide if he's joking,' a third shared. However, the Irish were quick to pull Garron up on his faltering accent, knowing there's no way he could truly fake a Mayo brogue that well. 'You coughed in Irish,' one user joked. 'The way you say 'circle' gave you away,' a second scolded.
