The unassuming parish where a future pope was once an altar boy

Chicago: On a sunny Friday morning the day after Pope Leo XIV was crowned, Terri Crowley and her husband, John, drove an hour across the city to take a look at the pope’s childhood church.

St Mary of the Assumption Church in Riverdale, on Chicago’s south side, is a shell of its former self, having closed in 2011. There is debris and glass littering the floor, graffiti on the walls and a gaping hole in the roof.

St Mary of the Assumption Church in Riverdale, on the south side of Chicago, has been vacant for years.Credit: AP

But this unassuming parish in an unloved part of town is where the new leader of the Catholic Church sang in the choir, served as an altar boy and attended school.

“We’re truly blessed. Words can’t describe it,” Terri said of the home town hero’s rise. “It was really amazing to see he had dual citizenship, too. We really appreciated that – that he had a global perspective on everything.”

The Crowleys get around a lot themselves: often to Australia. As it turns out – purely by coincidence – Terri’s nephew is Mason Cox, the 211-centimetre, Texas-born ruckman for the ladder-leading Collingwood Football Club. They’ve visited Melbourne to see him play.

Sport is religion in Chicago. The biggest question locals had once Cardinal Robert Prevost became the new pope was which major league baseball team he supported: the Cubs or the White Sox. The Cubs shared a social media post proudly claiming him as one of theirs; his brother John quickly corrected the record.

“Whoever said Cubs on the radio got it wrong. It’s Sox,” he told NBC Chicago. And on the scoreboard at the White Sox’s home ground, punters attending a game against the Miami Marlins on Friday night were greeted by a large billboard congratulating “the south side’s very own Pope Leo XIV”.

The Pope’s baseball allegiance was even a topic of speculation at a special morning Mass inside the ornate Holy Name Cathedral, the seat of the archbishop of Chicago, which was rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

There, in his strong Chicago accent, Bishop Lawrence J. Sullivan told about 200 worshippers that, while locals rightly took great pride in one of their own becoming the pontiff, there were larger, less parochial matters at hand.

“Having a shepherd matters. Having someone to guide us as a universal church matters,” he said. “And so, far more importantly than celebrating a home town hero, and far more important than celebrating the fact that we have a first pope from the United States, the real celebration is that God has given us a shepherd, and that we gather here today knowing that, as our shepherd, he is in need of our prayers.”

Bishop Lawrence J. Sullivan, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago, said the most important thing was that the church had a new shepherd.Credit: AP

Pope Leo’s father was a school teacher and principal, and his mother a librarian at a Catholic high school. She also used to volunteer at Holy Name. Sullivan said she was a “wonderful, wonderful person”, who shared her sense of God’s love through reading and helping children.

He said he watched the white smoke blow above St Peter’s Square on a television at the church office with his team. “There was just such an air of excitement,” he told reporters following the service. “But again, we would have been very, very excited no matter who was chosen.”

A few blocks from St Mary of the Assumption in Dolton, half an hour south of the city centre, is Prevost’s childhood home – a modest, single-storey brick house in a pretty street that sold for $US66,000 ($103,000) last year. The property was recently back on the market, with the owners certain to cash in.

“It’s been pretty wild,” real estate agent Steve Budzik told local media. Offers are pouring in, though the listing has been taken down for now.

Donna Sagna, who lives next door to Pope Leo XIV’s childhood home in Dolton, on the south side of Chicago.Credit: Michael Koziol

But for Donna Sagna, who lives next door, the news brought opportunity of a different kind. A devout Catholic and school teacher, she has been involved in “peace walks” remembering young people killed by gang violence, an endemic problem in this notorious part of Chicago. With the world’s media camped outside, she erected a cross on the lawn bearing the faces of victims. One of her own students was shot dead, she said.

For Sagna, the Pope’s former home is the scene of the violence, drug dealing and hardship she has witnessed in the eight years she has lived there. She is taking Pope Leo’s rise as a sign that God is aware of her community’s struggles, and she is praying for more help.

“I feel that the Pope – because he lived in that same house – the Pope is close to those that have mental health issues, he’s close to those that are poor. God is close to the poor and to the broken-hearted,” she says.

“Because the Pope lived here, it helps me to see that God is even concerned with the people that are doing the crimes, if that makes any sense.”

Laura Spingola, a long-time parishioner at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, believes Pope Leo will continue the progressive work of his predecessor Pope Francis.Credit: Michael Koziol

Here in Chicago, a heavily Democratic city and a so-called “sanctuary city” for undocumented migrants, many people instinctively mention Prevost’s decades in Peru, of which he is also a citizen. They are also hopeful he will continue the more progressive bent instigated by his predecessor, Pope Francis.

Laura Spingola, a born and raised Chicagoan who has attended Holy Name Cathedral for more than 25 years, said the variety of Prevost’s experience would be a boon for the world’s 1.5 billion Catholics, who ran the gamut from urban to rural, rich to poor.

“I think people were very concerned prior to this [papal] election, and they thought: is it possible that the efforts of Pope Francis would be negated, and we would go back to being very conservative?” she said.

The Chicago White Sox honour Pope Leo XIV on the scoreboard before a baseball game.Credit: AP

“So far, we understand that, no, we are going to continue with the really important concerns of poverty, of marginalisation, that Pope Francis really began, in a way.”

Bishop Sullivan discouraged reporters from prognosticating on the new Pope’s politics. “I don’t really think popes define themselves in those ways,” he said.

“I think his one and only concern is care for the poor, being a voice for the voiceless and to bring God’s love into the world. I don’t think he fits anywhere at all on a political spectrum.”

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