The Pope, The Parish, and Chicago(land)'s Holy Geography
(Or A Spatial Dispensation for a Suburban Pope)
The moment white smoke billowed from the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel chimney, my phone exploded with texts: "The new pope is from Chicago!"
Chicago, I knew, was about to go pope-crazy. Sure enough, the memes flew fast and furious: there were AI-generated pictures of the newly elected Pontiff holding an Italian beef sandwich, wearing a Bears-styled cassock (the main fancy papal garment), armed with pizza slices instead of communion wafers, and taking holy digs at the Green Bay Packers. And let’s not forget Jake and Elwood Blues, standing with the man they’d surely call “Pope Bob” and declaring, of course, "We're on a mission from God."
Even as the pixels dried on the memes, I had two burning questions that I’m sure were shared by many Chicagoans: First, because sports tend to run at least neck-and-neck with theology in this town, “Sox or Cubs?” And second, because I’m me (and Chicagoans are like this): “What neighborhood’s this guy from?”
As it happened, Cardinal Robert Prevost—now Pope Leo XIV—hadn't grown up in Chicago, but in across-the-street, first-ring suburb Dolton.
Such geographic hairsplitting might sound ridiculous. But Chicago is a city where your parish and your house’s location relative to Western Avenue are more crucial to your local bonafides than any government record. To many Chicagoans, “Where are you from?” isn't so much small talk as identity verification via geographic interrogation. Around here, claiming you’re from the city when you really hail from Naperville is a cardinal sin.
Which brings me back to the Pope and the small matter of being “from Chicago.” Maybe he gets some special spacial dispensation because of his new position?
The South Side Catholic Gangland
Pope Leo grew up mere blocks from Chicago proper in the then-working-class Ivanhoe Manor neighborhood of Dolton, around 141st and Indiana Avenue, where he attended St. Mary of the Assumption. Cross 138th from his childhood home and you'd be in Chicago's Riverdale community area; look east across the Little Calumet River and there's Altgeld Gardens. The boundary between "Chicago" and "not Chicago" here is municipal fiction—the neighborhoods flow together in a seamless South Side tapestry of modest homes, corner stores, railroad tracks, and parish steeples. The neighborhood vibe extends southward to South Holland and even into Hammond, Indiana.
Maybe Dolton gets a pass because it feels more "city-like" than more affluent suburbs. As, Rob Paral, a scholar the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute described it: "He is from the grit and real Chicago which these days is exemplified as much by the southern suburbs as it is by anything in the city." (In this coverage in New York Times) This rings true today, more so than it did five decades ago when the Prevost family arrived.
Dolton's Rise and Fall: The Pope's Origin Story
What I mean to say is that the Dolton of Pope Leo's childhood no longer exists.
The pontiff came of age in what was still a working-class postwar community, the exact type of place countless Americans were told to aspire to in the mid-20th century and that also served as a landing spot for "white flight" urbanites. Indeed, when the Pope attended school there in the 1960s and early ‘70s, Dolton was the classic white working-class suburban dream: plentiful nearby manufacturing jobs, affordable homes, solid schools, and reliable services. Things changed. Between the 1980 and the 2010 Census, the community transformed from 94% white to 90% Black. Today, about 22% of Dolton's population lives below the poverty line, compared to under 10% back in 1980.
Prevost departed for college just as the economic foundations of his hometown began crumbling. Throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, American deindustrialization hit Chicagoland's southern edge with particular ferocity. Wisconsin Steel closed its huge mill in 1980, and U.S. Steel's South Works plant was in the grip of a downsizing that would end with complete closure by 1992.
Source: Chicago Public Library. “Save Our Jobs Committee members outside Wisconsin Steel Works, circa 1984.”
The young Robert Prevost may have witnessed the beginnings of this transformation, but likely missed the full cascade of challenges that followed when he left for seminary. Manufacturing jobs vanished, white residents fled, and Black families moved in seeking better housing, only to find the economic opportunity they sought had just recently disappeared.
Communities like Dolton were devastated as unemployment soared, property values collapsed, and property tax rates tripled (Dolton’s are now more than three times Chicago's). A community of stable homeowners transformed into one increasingly dominated by renters, and resources for schools and public safety dried up. Since 1970s, when unemployment in Dolton was as low as 2.7%, the rate climbed to over 13% during the Great Recession. Even today, it stands at nearly double the statewide average.
Dolton reveals the upending of our simplistic notion of suburban prosperity. As poverty researcher Elizabeth Kneebone told Congress in 2017, there are now more people living in poverty in America’s suburbs than in its cities. Chicago area suburbs alone saw an eye-watering 84% increase in poverty between 2000 and 2015. If the Dolton of Pope Leo’s childhood represented a sort of working-class American Dream, the Dolton of today represents the reversal of many suburban fortunes. It’s a place once defined by opportunity, now marked by struggle.
Saints, Colors, and School Uniforms
The Chicago(land) that shaped our new pontiff wasn't tourist Chicago but parish Chicago(land)—a region historically carved up like ecclesiastical gang territory, where your Catholic school colors marked your turf as surely as any street crew. I know this landscape intimately. Though I was baptized at St. Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church, I endured a 16-year "bid" in Catholic schools. For the first decade of my life, I navigated the city based on parish turf and train stops.
In the 1980s, my grammar school, St. Gertrude's, wore blue and gold. We were the Eagles. Our rivals flew different colors: St. Henry's in yellow and brown, St. Hilary's in red, St. Ignatius in maroon, and St. Vitar’s in purple. Each parish had its own plaid jumper pattern for girls and distinct uniform shirts for boys, identity badges announcing your allegiance from blocks away. To me, the city was divided not by census tracts but by saints' territories.
Growing up Catholic in 1960s Chicago, as Pope Leo did, meant living inside this parallel urban geography where the parish defined your social universe. Your basketball rivals weren't just from another neighborhood but another saint's jurisdiction. Church basements hosted more substantive community-building than most aldermanic offices. And understanding neighborhood boundaries—and even city versus suburb divides—meant knowing not only spatial boundaries but a complicated social GPS of institutional ones as well.
From Parish Contraction to Papal Expansion
This sacred geography has been shrinking, undergoing a kind of spiritual gentrification as old Church buildings are repurposed as condos, arts spaces, and storefronts. Only 216 of the 445 Catholic parishes in 1970 Chicago remain, mostly because the parishes of my youth couldn't sustain their independence. In 1994, St. Gertrude merged with five others, joining with longtime rivals of St. Gregory, St. Henry, St. Ignatius, St. Ita, and St. Jerome.
Pope Leo's background in Dolton puts him at the intersection of another crucial fault line: race. Remember, during his lifetime, Dolton transformed from a white enclave to a predominantly Black community. This same demographic sea changes reshaped Chicago's South Side and nearby suburbs. Learning to navigate these fault lines—between parishes, between gangs, between racial enclaves—would have been critical training for someone now tasked with leading a global church riven by its own deep divisions, especially the current geo-political moment. The skills of a Chicago-area kid who grew up amid shifting boundaries may prove surprisingly relevant to managing the fractures between progressive and traditional sects worldwide.
To me, there’s something fitting about Chicago(land) producing the first American pope. The institution that once mapped Chicago’s neighborhoods so precisely now looks to one of its own sons for renewal. Pope Leo's journey from the margins of the city to the center of global Catholicism parallels how neighborhoods themselves work. Even his choice of papal name connects to these roots—Leo XIII was known for his groundbreaking teaching on workers' rights and the dignity of labor, a fitting tribute from a pontiff raised on the industrial South Side.
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So, is Pope Leo a Chicagoan or not? Chicago claims many of its edge-dwellers—Al Capone in Cicero (most of Chicago's notorious mobsters resided in River Forest); the Belushi brothers in Wheaton; Bill Murray in Wilmette; Eddie Vedder and the Cusacks in Evanston; and Dwyane Wade, another Dolton kid. Chicago claims them all.
The deeper truth is that Pope Leo comes from a specific Chicago(land) ecosystem, one where parishes, not just postal codes, shaped identity, where the sacred and secular weren't neatly separated but woven together in the daily rituals of neighborhood life. And for the record, his brother has confirmed: the holy man, he's a Sox fan.
Sounds like a Chicagoan after all.
Chicagoan or Not? Leave a Comment
What's your verdict—is Pope Leo XIV a Chicagoan? And where does your city draw the line between 'from here' and 'claiming to be from here'?
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Further Investigations
For more on Chicago's Catholic landscapes, try John T. McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries" or Ellen Skerrett's "Chicago's Neighborhoods and the Eclipse of Sacred Space." For a deep dive into the Far South Side communities near Dolton, check out Natalie Moore's "The South Side," which explores how these boundaries profoundly shape community identity. And, to understand Dolton's dramatic transformation, see WBEZ's excellent interactive feature "An American Suburb, 2018."
Fascinating article. I grew up in South Shore in the 1950s, when it was mostly Irish Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish with a sprinkling of Protestants. I’m of Jewish and Eastern Orthodox descent so naturally I went to the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park. There were zero Catholic kids in my grammar school; they all went to St. Philip Neri parochial school. I only met Catholic kids in high school and college, although almost all my grammar school teachers were Irish Catholic (there were rumors about which of them had been kicked out of the convent). So many different Chicagos!
Excellent piece.