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Intimate and humane: Pope Leo is a true son of Chicago
The Observer
|May 11, 2025
It's likely that the only white smoke young Robert Prevost ever saw coming out of chimneys was from the US steel mills at the South Works.
The far South Side of Chicago is a shot and a beer place, block after block of tiny, tidy postwar bungalows a long way from the Art Institute and the city's famous skyscrapers, and even farther from the Vatican. Had he ever imagined it?
My mother surely did. She grew up in Evergreen Park, another South Side suburb, and chucked from the novitiate, a failed nun, taught religion for about 45 years in the archdiocese of Chicago. I suspect she hoped I'd take a career path similar to that of the new Pope Leo XIV and for a while I went along - including the year I dressed for Halloween as a disturbingly accurate Cardinal Cody (my lowest candy yield ever). She would have been wildly proud of this day and found a way to own it: which is what every other Chicagoan is doing, with memes on "Da Pope" and pictures of him at Sox games.
This story is from the May 11, 2025 edition of The Observer.
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