‘Nice Boy Up from the Parishes’
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“We have a pope.” The election of Pope Leo XIV on May 8 was a stunner: “American elected pope!” Not simply an American pope, mind you, but a pope born and raised in Chicago. You needn’t have been in Chicago on May 8, or since, to share the elation and sense of vindication. If you were born and raised in Chicago, ever lived there, or merely passed through on US 41 (running along Lake Michigan), you’d instinctively grasp the true import of this election. Chicago Catholicism is distinctive and one of its own is now the pope. No more “second city” gibes. Wherever you live, if you are part of Chicago’s vast diaspora (as I am), you were inundated with emails, phone calls, conversations, TV commentary, podcasts, and high-fives.
The information rollout seems never to end. Only yesterday, my husband’s voice rose from behind a copy of The New York Times to announce a new discovery about the pope: “His mother was born in 1912, the same as my mother. His mother went to Immaculata, so did mine. Maybe they graduated the same year.” It’s very possible that Margaret Hollahan (Steinfels) and Mildred Martínez (Prevost) were classmates, taught by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 1920s. Small world! Even The New York Times, usually more focused on Chicago’s current woes, has produced a “you are there” account of Leo XIV’s family history since the 1850s: Louisiana ancestors, New Orleans and Chicago property records, parish activities, and Catholic education (do they have his grades?).
The Chicago Catholic Church grew up with the city itself. Coming of age on the South Side, Robert Prevost lived within its tightly knit network of Catholic communities and institutions, from the hospital where one was born to the cemetery where one was buried. No square mile without a parish church was the vision of Archbishop James Quigley (1903–15), so that “the pastor can know personally every man, woman, and child.” In outlying areas, it took a while for that grid to be filled, while in older areas, national parishes bumped up against one another. In time, the city’s streets and boulevards were dotted with churches (usually on the corner) and their rectories, along with schools and their convents. Sure, Protestant churches, synagogues, Bible schools, and temples also abounded, but parishes were handy neighborhood identifiers for anyone. The pope’s family attended Mass at St. Mary of the Assumption, where he and his brothers went to school and served as altar boys, and where his mother sang in the choir. The 1962 picture of Robert’s second-grade class could have been mine at St. Ita’s in 1947 (smiling children, hands crossed on their desks, bodies momentarily at rest). “Those schools,” a lifelong Chicago friend wrote to me the other day, “got us to where we ultimately arrived, which was pretty good…. That holds true for Leo XIV, a nice boy up from the parishes.”
Ethnicity, race, and class all intersected in these neighborhoods. The pope may never have met a Peruvian before he began his priestly mission, but his own family was a microcosm of Chicago’s ethnic and racial “salad” (French, Creole, Italian, and Spanish). On the South Side, a twenty-seven-minute drive north of Dolton, where the Prevosts lived, is Bronzeville, home to thousands of Southern Black people who came north in the Great Migration (1910–1970). Along with them came his mother’s and father’s Louisiana-born families.
Bridgeport, another South Side enclave, this one Irish, was home to the family of Chicago’s long-serving mayor, Richard J. Daley. Other Irish, like my paternal grandmother, gradually moved to the North Side after World War I, where they settled in next to the Swedes. According to my mother, German and Polish families on the West Side vied with each other to have the cleanest porch and front steps. With ethnic ties came ethnic parishes, which Cardinal George Mundelein (1915–1939) tried to discourage, against strong local resistance. Childhood visits to my grandmother during the 1940s featured the choir of St. Alphonsus Church belting out German hymns. Like my own Irish-German parents, the pope’s Creole mother and Haitian father were in an ethnically mixed marriage. (Rumor has it that theirs was also a White Sox–Cubs mixed marriage—also like my parents’ marriage.)
“What Has Made Chicago Catholicism Distinctive?” That ever-fascinating question opens Catholicism, Chicago Style (Loyola Press, 1993), a book published to mark the Chicago Archdiocese’s 150th anniversary. To answer it, the authors, Ellen Skerrett, Edward R. Kantowicz, and Steven M. Avella, cite the distinctive composition of the city’s ethnic diversity. Though the Irish made up a plurality (but not a majority) of Catholics, they were quickly joined by sizeable waves of German and Polish Catholics, Bohemians and Slovaks from the Austrian Empire, Italians, Lithuanians, and, in time, members from a dozen other nationalities. According to one theory, shepherding this flock of very different sheep produced a degree of openness—of live-and-let-live and even of risk-taking—that was unusual in the pre–Vatican II Church. One might describe it in Leo’s phrase as “the coexistence of diversity.”
There was room for both Marian devotions and Catholic crusades against atheistic communism and immodest dress. But there were also speeches by Bishop Bernard Sheil that supported the labor movement and attacked segregation, antisemitism, and the right-wing demagoguery of his fellow Catholics Fr. Charles Coughlin and Sen. Joe McCarthy. The Sheil School of Social Studies was an outgrowth of the Catholic Youth Organization, Bishop Sheil’s citywide effort to reclaim urban teens through athletics (especially boxing). The Sheil School was a hotbed of social-justice activities. At the same time, Chicago was the home of the “specialized Catholic Action movements”: the Young Christian Workers, the Young Christian Students, and the Christian Family Movement. These were nurtured by Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, a pioneer of liturgical renewal, whose tenure as head of Chicago’s seminary produced a generation of priests who were social activists and community organizers. They joined laypeople in the Catholic Interracial Council, the Catholic Labor Alliance, the labor paper Work, the interracial Friendship House, and The Critic, a literary journal. Of the three young founders of a Depression-era Catholic Worker House, two—John Cogley and James O’Gara—became Commonweal editors in the 1950s while the third, Ed Marciniak, mentored Peter Steinfels, who joined the staff in the 1960s.
Chicago’s ethnic Catholicism was distinct in another way. From its beginning, it was not embattled with an entrenched establishment, as the Irish-led Church was in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. There were nativist slurs, of course, like the 1885 Chicago Tribune editorial Ellen Skerrett quotes: “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community, are Irish Catholics?” But that passed. The postwar Chicago Church I knew had none of the lingering defensive edge I’ve often encountered on the East Coast. Its mood was well captured by the title of Steven Avella’s study of its 1940–65 lay and clerical leadership, This Confident Church. If Pope Leo seems to many like a man comfortable in his own skin, it may be partly because he grew up in a Church comfortable in its city.
Nothing stands still: post–World War II ethnic boundaries were already loosening during the pope’s childhood; second and third generations were moving to the suburbs. Yet, as John McGreevy’s Parish Boundaries attests, for both religious and ethnic reasons, Catholics were more stubbornly territorial than their Protestant and Jewish neighbors. The arrival of a growing Black population looking for better housing brought new racial tensions to old ethnic neighborhoods. Still, among postwar ethnic generations, a mix of kids went to parish schools and Mass together. (My own had Irish, Italian, German, and one—but only one—Black student.) In sex-segregated high schools, young Catholics met and mingled through a rich schedule of sock hops, dances, and theater productions, along with an array of diocesan programs. Young Catholics could choose among a wide range of high schools, including Quigley, the boys-only diocesan minor seminary. Robert Prevost instead went off to an Augustinian seminary high school in Holland, Michigan, and eventually became an Augustinian friar. In the 1970s, he returned to attend the Catholic Theological Union, which was founded in 1968 by a consortium of religious orders and drew a varied student body of clergy, religious, and laypeople. The media have reported that on visits home, Prevost had summer jobs, taught at the Augustinian high school St. Rita’s, and perhaps mowed the lawn.
The family home where Prevost and his two brothers grew up still stands and is now in danger of becoming some kind of monument. The small brick house is a reminder of Chicago’s preference for single-family homes. A bungalow on a small plot of land, with yards front and back, represented the American dream. Dolton, the village in which the house stands, just over the city’s southern border, was once prairie land occupied by the Potawatomi, Sac, Illini, and Miami. Its more recent history tells a still-developing story. In 1970, Dolton had forty-two Black residents. By 2025, there were 21,000, representing about 90 percent of the population. Did Dolton’s proximity to Chicago’s South Side make it a suburban respite for Bronzeville’s crowded quarters? Perhaps Dolton and Chicago both prepared Fr. Prevost for the journey to Peru—and prepared Pope Leo for the challenges of a city, a nation, and a world facing the “coexistence of diversity.”
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