In Chicago, Will the Pope Bump Last?
In Chicago, people are very excited about Pope Leo XIV, or Father Bob, as those who’ve known Robert Francis Prevost a long time reflexively call him. It’s titillating to imagine Pope Leo roaming the city, chowing down on an Italian-beef sandwich, scarfing a deep-dish pizza, and taking in a White Sox game. “Da Pope.”
Many Chicagoans I’ve spoken with have shared their six-degrees-of-separation stories. Mimi Cowan, the Field Museum’s director of government affairs and sponsored programs, sent me a screenshot of a text message from her parents: “Tom & I have a seriously close connection to the new Pope!!! One of our closest friends, Keith, has a cousin who is a Jesuit priest in Chicago. He is best friends with the Pope & Pope’s brother! They went to school together! Keith figures he’s got a good chance to party with the Pope if he comes to Chicago to see his brother & close friends!” Bonnie Clapp is a server at the Kerryman, an Irish bar and restaurant in the River North neighborhood which sold discounted shots of Malört, a liqueur famous in Chicago, to those wanting to celebrate Leo. She told me that she overheard a woman at a table she was waiting on say, “I’m kind of a big deal—I’m related to the Pope.”
César Izquierdo, the owner of Taste of Peru, a popular restaurant in the Rogers Park neighborhood, said that he cried as he looked at a photo of his mother upon learning that the new Pope was from Chicago and Peru. Pope Leo spent more than two decades living in northern Peru, first as a young missionary in Chulucanas and Trujillo, almost continuously from 1985 to 1998, and then again from 2015 to 2023, when he served as the Bishop of Chiclayo. In this respect, the Pope is hardly an exception, as many Chicago pastors have been sent to do missionary work in Latin America, according to the historian Deborah Kanter. But because of his love for the country, Leo became a naturalized Peruvian citizen in 2015.
Izquierdo, who was born in Lima, said that it was a “double whammy” that the new Pope came from the two places he most closely identified with. He noted that the restaurant’s seco de cordero dish—lamb cooked in red wine, beer, ancho chile, red peppers, and pumpkin, served with white rice and canary beans—would soon be renamed Seco de Cordero al Estilo Papa León. (Izquierdo had heard that the Pope’s favorite meal is goat with an Inca Kola. Right now, the menu features a goat special, in honor of Leo, but going forward they’ll likely just rename their lamb dish after him.) The colors of the Vatican are white and yellow, so Izquierdo had placed white and yellow roses on every table. A few days later, a student at Northwestern, where I teach, told me that the Vatican flag was flying in front of the restaurant. César’s daughter Sara told me that the regulars who come into the restaurant—mostly Peruvians—have taken to shouting, “El Papa es peruano y la papa, también”—the Pope is Peruvian, and the potato is, too. (Potatoes were first domesticated in the Andes. Spaniards brought them to Europe in the sixteenth century.)
The excitement in more hallowed halls is also palpable. The Holy Name Cathedral, in the heart of downtown Chicago, held a special Mass in honor of Pope Leo. Bishop Lawrence Sullivan, a native South Sider and the vicar general for the Archdiocese of Chicago, said that it was “a natural tendency for us to be grateful that a fellow-Chicagoan has been elected as supreme Pontiff.” Father Michael Trail, the pastor at St. Thomas the Apostle, a historically Black church in Hyde Park which he said is now “a third Black, a third white, and a third everything else,” told me that his parishioners were “over the moon” about Leo’s election. During a Spanish-language Mass at St. Paul’s Church in Pilsen, a predominantly Latino neighborhood southwest of downtown, Father Domingo Hurtado-Badillo, after mentioning the Pope’s birth in Chicago, the many languages he speaks, and his tenure in Peru, said, “We have many things to celebrate and thank God for.” The Archdiocese, seizing this moment of papal frenzy, will hold a Mass on June 14th at Rate Field, where the White Sox play, while the team will be out of town for a series against the Texas Rangers.
When Leo was in his late twenties, after completing his studies at the Catholic Theological Union and after his ordination at the church of Santa Monica degli Agostiniani, in Rome, but before his first stint in Peru, he taught at St. Rita of Cascia High School, on the South Side. He visited the parish last August, as a cardinal, to celebrate the feast day of St. Clare of Montefalco. The day after the Pope’s election, Father Tom McCarthy, the director of community relations at St. Rita, who has known the Pope for more than forty years, posted a two-minute video to the school’s Facebook page. “I just want to speak to you on behalf of the whole St. Rita family of how proud we should all be, because he is one of us. If you are an alum, if you are a parent, if you are a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a supporter, a friend of St. Rita, this is about all of us. The student body here has gone crazy.” The video has fifty-five thousand views.
McCarthy is also the director of vocations for the Midwest Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, which means that he’s in charge of recruiting new priests to the order. He told me that the Augustinian Vocations of North America’s website, beafriar.org, which usually gets about a thousand visits per month, got thirty-seven thousand visits in the days after Pope Leo’s election.
All the excitement about Leo raises the question: Will the Chicago-born Pope give a much needed boost to the Catholic Church in the city and in other areas of the United States where Catholicism is on the decline? Since Leo’s election, the number of people attending Mass has been way up. Lori Doyle, who manages communications for Holy Name Cathedral, told me that services there were standing room only. But will the bump last? Pope Francis, the first Pope from the Americas, was extremely popular in the United States, but in March, 2014, a year after his election, the Pew Research Center found that there had been no discernable “Pope Francis effect” among non-practicing U.S. Catholics. Still, Father Trail thinks that things might be different this time, because Pope Leo is a Chicago Pope—an American Pope.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Archbishops Patrick Feehan and James Edward Quigley, both appointed by the last Pope Leo, nurtured separate parishes for Chicago’s ethnic groups. The city experienced tremendous population growth, owing especially to immigration from countries such as Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Italy. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, after which many converted to Catholicism. Some twenty thousand Mexicans, most of whom were Catholic, also arrived during and after the Mexican Revolution. The ethnic parishes helped settle these new communities, individually if not in communion with one another. The Mass was in Latin, but the homilies were in their own languages, delivered by pastors who shared their heritage. Chicago’s Polish community worshipped at St. Stanislaus Kostka. Italians went to Our Lady of Pompeii. African Americans went to St. Anselm. Mexicans went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. There were more than a thousand priests and hundreds of parishes and parochial schools.
In Chicago today, many Catholics still hear Mass alongside the members of their own ethnic group. Leo is claimed by all of them: Black Catholics because of his mother’s family’s Creole roots in Haiti and New Orleans, Latino Catholics because he’s a Peruvian citizen, and Catholics of all other heritages because of the leadership positions he has held in recent years, which have required him to travel and meet the faithful around the world.
But the Catholic Church in Chicago today is diminished. In the mid-twentieth century, the Archdiocese of Chicago consisted of some one and a half million people—nearly half the city’s population. Now Chicago is less than a third Catholic. Parishes have had to close, and the schools attached to them have remained open by consolidating. But many of the city’s Catholics hope that Pope Leo will be able to improve the Church’s prospects. In Chicago, like other cities with significant Catholic populations, the Church is increasingly reliant on immigrant communities, especially Latin Americans, for much of its vitality. In a city that is thirty per cent Latino, Latinos make up almost half of all Catholics.
During the special Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, Bishop Sullivan said, “Once we found out it was a Chicagoan, the question was: Is he a White Sox fan or is he a Cubs fan? Is he going to be a Bears fan, and where do the Packers fit into all of this? Those are good questions, because what they do is lead us, or give us an opportunity to share with people who we are as a body of Christ, who we are as a Christian people. And so when people are asking us about the Holy Father’s childhood home, we should engage them in conversation, and then we should remind them that they are loved as God’s children.” Chicagoans may become curious about Catholicism because of Leo’s affinities for Chicago sports teams, but, Sullivan suggests, they would stay only if they were moved by the Church’s teachings.
