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New York Times
10-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Pope's Childhood in a Changing Chicago Tells a Story of Catholic America
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.'
Japan Times
09-05-2025
- General
- Japan Times
Chicago celebrates its native son's elevation to pope
The old parish church buildings on Chicago's far South Side where Pope Leo XIV grew up, attended grammar school and launched his career as a priest are now vacated and in disrepair, a victim of the sometimes painful changes within the Roman Catholic Church since he was a boy. Even so, the derelict structures stand as a silent reminder to the new pontiff's deep, longstanding ties to the city and the second-largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States. Former Cardinal Robert Prevost stunned his hometown on Thursday when the Vatican announced that the 69-year-old Chicago native had been chosen as the first U.S.-born pontiff in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. His selection unleashed celebration among Catholics in the Midwestern city and a flurry of questions about the future of his papacy, from how it would shape the divide between church conservatives and liberals to whether he was a fan of the Chicago Cubs or their rivals, the White Sox. When he was newly ordained, Prevost celebrated Mass at St. Mary of the Assumption, his home parish. | REUTERS "For Catholics in Chicago, this is somebody who gets us, who knows us, who knows our experience, seeing the closures and the dwindling congregations, and the diminishing Catholic presence in America in general," said Rev. Michael Pfleger, a priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church on Chicago's South Side known for his political activism. A crowd of clergy and staff members at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago's Hyde Park, where the future pontiff obtained his master's degree in divinity in 1982, erupted in joyful cheers as live television showed Pope Leo walking out onto the Vatican balcony in Rome. "Many of us were just simply incredulous and just couldn't even find words to express our delight, our pride," said Sister Barbara Reid, the president of the theology school. She said the "explosion of excitement" was followed by quiet as the room fell into prayer for the new pope. Reid described Pope Leo as a brilliant intellectual and a person of extraordinary compassion. "It's an unusual blend that makes him a leader who can think critically, but listens to the cries of the poorest, and always has in mind those who are most needy," she said. A view inside St. Mary of the Assumption in Chicago | REUTERS Bishop Lawrence Sullivan, the vicar general for the Archdiocese of Chicago, its 1.9 million Catholics and 216 parishes, said Pope Leo was also a very prayerful and spiritual man. "It's a day of great excitement for Chicago, for the United States to have one of our own be elected as the pope," he said. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, in remarks posted on social media, was more plain-spoken in his exuberance, declaring, "Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago!" The pope-to-be, by all accounts an exceptional student as a youngster, grew up in the old St. Mary of Assumption parish at the far southern edge of Chicago, attending grade school there and serving as an altar boy. He later studied at the novitiate of the Order of Saint Augustine in St. Louis, according to the Catholic Conference of Illinois, before graduating from Villanova University near Philadelphia in 1977 with a degree in mathematics. Bishop Lawrence Sullivan, the vicar general for the Archdiocese of Chicago, speaks to the media at the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago on Thursday after Prevost was announced as Pope Leo XIV. | REUTERS He then returned to Chicago to attend divinity school and joined the Augustinian religious order. When he was newly ordained, he celebrated Mass in his home parish, St. Mary of the Assumption. Since then he has spent the majority of his career overseas, mainly in Peru. His family's parish, situated in a leafy area on the far South Side near the Little Calumet River, has long been shuttered, tattered curtains fluttering in the red brick building's shattered windows. Blocks of clapboard houses and Protestant churches surrounding the church — which closed when the archdiocese consolidated parishes — were quiet on Thursday afternoon. In a goodwill gesture in keeping with the atmosphere of excitement on Thursday, the Chicago Cubs said they had invited the new pope to Wrigley Field to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," a seventh-inning tradition led by a different celebrity at every home game. The storied Major League Baseball team said they could not confirm that Pope Leo was a Cubs fan. His brother, John Prevost, who lives in New Lenox southwest of Chicago, said the new pontiff was not. Residents of Chicago's South Side tend to favor the Cubs' cross-town rivals, the White Sox. Students from Everest Academy in Lemont, Illinois, who were by the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago on Thursday react after Prevost was announced as pope. | REUTERS Kevin Schultz, professor of history and Catholic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Leo's ascendancy would inject energy and excitement into an archdiocese whose community is defined by an array of ethnicities and languages and is increasingly shaped by migrants from Latin America. "We are in the forefront of the changing dynamic of the church throughout the world, with our increasing number of immigrants constituting a larger and larger percentage of the Catholic population in the archdiocese of Chicago," Schultz said. The rise of the Chicago-born priest to the papacy was not without controversy. In 2023, survivors of clergy sex abuse filed a complaint with the Vatican over Prevost and others after the Chicago-based chapter of the Augustinian order that he once led paid a $2 million settlement over rape accusations by a priest whose name was left off a public list of sex offenders.
The Independent
08-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
Catholic Chicagoans celebrate as native son Pope Leo XIV becomes first American pope
After white smoke billowed Thursday from the Sistine Chapel, signaling that a pope had been chosen, students in every classroom at The Frances Xavier Warde School in Chicago had their eyes glued to TV screens. As the image of the new pope, Chicago native Cardinal Robert Prevost, appeared onscreen, cheers erupted through the hallways. Children jumped out of their seats, pumping their hands in the air. 'Our students are just beside themselves," said Mary Perrotti, director of advancement at the school. 'They're beyond excited and can't believe a Chicagoan is their new pope. They were in awe.' Prevost, 69, took the name Leo XIV and replaced Pope Francis, who died last month. The first American elected pontiff, Pope Leo XIV was born and raised in Chicago before undertaking his ministry in Peru. Catholic Chicagoans gathered in churches and celebrated from their homes as the historic decision was announced. 'Our young people have a model now of a leader with justice and compassion at the heart of his ministries — and who is from their home,' Perrotti said. "It's such a deep feeling of connection for them.' Prevost was born in 1955 in the south side Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville and grew up in suburban Dolton, where he attended Mass and elementary school at St. Mary of the Assumption. He later studied theology at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago in Hyde Park and taught in local Catholic schools, including at St. Rita High School, according to the school. Linda Eickmann, 62, was also born and raised in Dalton and attended St. Mary's. When she saw the news of the new pope on TV, she screamed with joy. 'How cool is that?" she said. "A pope from my elementary school, from my town. It's unreal.' Eickmann remembered Prevost's family as being so deeply involved in the St. Mary's community that everyone knew their names. They ran sloppy joe sales to raise money for the school, and all their sons were altar boys, including Prevost. Everyone at St. Mary's knew Prevost wanted to be a priest one day, Eickmann said. Raul Raymundo, co-founder of a local community advocacy group called the Resurrection Project, said Thursday was a proud day for Chicagoans and hoped Pope Leo XIV will "continue Pope Francis' legacy and Chicago's legacy of social justice and compassion, especially in welcoming immigrants.' 'There's tears of joy, of hope, of motivation to rise to this moment and leave this world better than we found it," said Raymundo, an immigrant from Mexico who grew up in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. At Holy Name Cathedral, about two dozen people gathered to pray as light filtered in through the stained glass windows. Father Gregory Sakowicz, the cathedral's rector, said that when the new pope was announced, the sun came out in the city — a coincidence that he described as 'God's way of remaining anonymous.' He said he was 'happily shocked,' and that he had a burning question: Whether the new Pope was a White Sox fan? When a journalist in the crowd said she'd heard Pope Leo XIV is a Cubs fan, Sakowicz chuckled. 'God bless him,' he said. Social media also erupted with excitement over Pope Leo XIV's Chicago connection and people swapped memes and jokes about Chicago staples — deep-dish and tavern-style pizza, the Chicago liqueur Malort and baseball. Many users also proclaimed hope the new pope would represent Chicago's history of social justice. 'For Catholic Chicagoans, to have a native son who has been born and raised in a city where support and care of all has always been central to who we are as a city, it really speaks volumes," Perrotti said. "I truly believe his upbringing in Chicago informs his ministries, his compassion and sense of justice. Now, he can give the world a sense of who we are as a city.'
