Robert Prevost, a dual citizen of Peru and the United States, was elected supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church by the College of Cardinals on May 8. I attended the Mass of thanksgiving the Chicago Archdiocese held on his behalf in early June at Rate Field on the city’s South Side. In July I visited Prevost’s childhood home at 212 East 141st Place on what one could call Chicago’s Even Farther South Side.
Both had the same feel: a sort of down-home sweetness and simplicity. People streamed into the stadium and folks drove up to his home to do nothing more than rejoice and marvel at the very fact of the first American pope (let alone the first Chicago pope). At the ballpark, 30,000 people came to celebrate him. The people going to the celebration knew he would not actually be there, and they went anyway.
It reminded me that, amid everything happening out there—what is raw and cruel and barbaric—holiness is always in season. People still want to believe in something better. They keep putting their faith in someone new. They don’t really give up. As one visitor to the Prevost home said about Pope Leo: “He gives us hope. We could use hope right now.”
The Prevost family lived on 141st Place for 47 years, between 1949 and 1996. The parents, Louis and Mildred, raised three sons there: Louis Martin, John Joseph and the future pope, or Rob as he was known to his family. Louis was a World War II veteran. The family was active at nearby Mary of the Assumption parish, where Rob was an altar server. Louis and Mildred were lifelong educators, Louis eventually becoming a school superintendent in the south suburb of Glenwood. Rob went off to an Augustinian minor seminary in Michigan at age 14, around 1969, never lived at home again, and then became perhaps the most famous living spiritual leader in the world.
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Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”
With thanks to America and Joe Hoover SJ, where this article originally appeared.
