Chicago celebrates native son's elevation to pope

By Emily Schmall, Tom Polansek and Christopher Walljasper

CHICAGO (Reuters) -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.

“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 Father 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, president of the theology school. She said the room fell into prayer after the initial burst of excitement.

Reid described Pope Leo as a brilliant intellectual 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," she said.

Lawrence Sullivan, vicar general for the Chicago Archdiocese, its 1.9 million Catholics and 216 parishes, said Pope Leo was also a very prayerful 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. The family lived in the adjacent town of Dolton, just south of the Chicago city limits.

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 mathematics degree.

He returned to Chicago to attend divinity school and joined the Augustinian religious order. When newly ordained he celebrated mass in his home parish. Since then he has spent most of his career overseas, mainly in Peru.

"I didn't think an American pope would actually ever be elected in my lifetime," said Gardis Watts, a Theological Union student who resides in Dolton and is two weeks away from obtaining his own divinity degree.

St. Mary of the Assumption church, 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.

CUBBIES OR SOX?

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.

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.

Dolton resident Jasmine Ramirez, 23, who lives across the street from Pope Leo's childhood home and described herself as not "very Catholic," said it was "cool" that "somebody like a pope lived in front of us. I feel like it's a small world."

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 Prevost once led paid a $2 million settlement over rape accusations by a priest whose name was left off a public list of sex offenders.

(Reporting by Emily Schmall, Tom Polansek and Christopher Walljasper in Chicago. Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien, Brad Brooks and Eric Cox. Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Frank McGurty, Diane Craft and Stephen Coates)