On an unseasonably chilly and windy Thursday afternoon in Chicago, a dozen or so people stood outside Wrigley Field, their phones drawn to snap a picture of the iconic marquee. It was celebrating the new pope, Robert Prevost, henceforth known as Leo XIV, who was (incorrectly, it seems) rumored to be a Cubs fan. One advertisement after another flashed across the screen—for Home Run Inn pizza, for Jewel-Osco, for the Wendella boat tour—but nothing about the Chicago-born pontiff.
“It feels like we’re waiting for the white smoke,” I said to the guy standing next to me.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” he replied as a frigid breeze blew across Clark Street. “I’d rather be in Rome.”
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Incidentally, I had just recently gotten back from Rome; my wife and I happened to be there when Pope Francis passed, the day after Easter. And when we went to the Vatican that evening to pay our respects like the good—albeit lapsed—Catholics we are, we found ourselves being interviewed by an Italian television reporter. “Do you want the next pope to be an American?” she asked. An American pope, at this moment in America? No, that’s all right, we said.
A Chicago pope, though? Well, that’s a different story.
Leo—who holds dual United States and Peruvian citizenship—was born at Mercy Hospital on Chicago’s South Side, grew up in the far south suburb of Dolton, and studied at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union while teaching math and physics at St. Rita on the southwest side, where it is common to identify not by neighborhood but by parish. (My stepdad went to St. Rita. My wife was part of the first class of girls to graduate from its rival, Marist. I went to public school in the suburbs and am still trying to wrap my head around all these feuds.)
Those Chicago roots could give Prevost a “unique perspective,” said James Robinson, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. “I think it’s really incredible that he comes from here,” Robinson told me. “Chicago people like to talk about this as the City of Broad Shoulders, the Windy City, but it is also, in my opinion, one of the most interesting religious cities in the country and the world.” Hyde Park—home of the University of Chicago, as well as the CTU, where Prevost studied—is “the center for the mixing of [religious] traditions,” Robinson said, adding that that’s “something that’s needed, I think, more than anything in this increasingly divisive world.”
Michael Patrick Murphy, director of Loyola University’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage and a senior lecturer at the school, had dinner with Prevost last summer in west suburban Wheaton while they were working on a project together. “We had a great couple hours,” Murphy told me. “He was such a great guy.” They exchanged emails; Murphy still has Prevost’s cell number saved in his phone. Now the 69-year-old is the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. “It’s mind-boggling,” Murphy said. “Chicago’s gonna eat this up.”
Indeed, the new pope’s Chicago roots have already elicited waves of jokes—“No ketchup on the Eucharist!” one friend texted in our group chat.
But Leo’s election will be about “more than the optics and spectacle” of having a new pope, Murphy said. Chicago is one of the most Catholic cities in the country, one where you might hear older Catholics speak reverently about when Pope John Paul II came to town in 1979. Do Leo’s roots portend another papal visit to Chicago? Perhaps.
