The election of Robert Francis Prevost as the Catholic Church’s 267th pontiff stunned audiences in America on Thursday, especially those in his hometown of Chicago, as his much-awaited name was read in Latin from a balcony of St Peter’s Basilica.
There has never before been a Pope from the United States.
“I’m astounded,” said Olympia Onesto from Deerfield, IL, a western suburb, on Thursday night. “I never thought they would elect an American, let alone someone from Chicago.”
A devout Catholic for 79 years, Onesto told Kyiv Post she didn’t know enough about the new pontiff to say whether she was optimistic about his direction for the Church, but she said she was “very, very happy,” adding only that it would be great if he could “do something about the corruption in Illinois.”
Chicago has always represented the melting pot of America, with a myriad of ethnicities arriving there especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Catholic churches in the western suburbs sit alongside Ukrainian Orthodox ones, and even Ukrainian Catholic ones as well.
St Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Catholic Church, for example, near O’Hare airport, is only about five miles up Cumberland Avenue from the mostly Italian St Vincent Ferrer, where many of Onesto’s family members went to church, and where one of her cousins served as an altar boy.
The West Side of Chicago is well-known for its Eastern European diaspora as well. The neighborhood known as “Ukrainian Village” sits about three miles west of the downtown Chicago skyline, and the even more famous Polish neighborhood of Bucktown is only a mile or two north of that on Western Ave.
The new pope is from the South Side of Chicago, a less-affluent neighborhood, and at the time of Prevost’s youth, it was mostly poverty-stricken.
Like his Jesuit predecessor and friend, Francis, the Chicagoan archbishop of the Augustinian mendicant order administered to the poor as a missionary in South America. Prevost is also known for his affinity for the working class, just like the fin-de-siècle pope, Leo XIII, after whom he named himself.
Pundits took that to believe that Prevost would be an advocate for the working class in the new American Gilded Age, following in the footsteps of other Chicago-educated socialists such as US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
While not projecting any possible leanings of the newly announced pope, an NBC reporter on Thursday commented that the new pontiff “showed courage as a Cubs fan on the South Side” of Chicago.
While the Chicago Cubs baseball team plays in the wealthier northern neighborhood of Wrigleyville, the South Side’s team is the Chicago White Sox.
Former US President Barack Obama, a White Sox fan, congratulated his “fellow Chicagoan” on his historic election as the first pope from the United States.
“Michelle and I send our congratulations to a fellow Chicagoan, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV.”
“This is a historic day for the United States, and we will pray for him as he begins the sacred work of leading the Catholic Church and setting an example for so many, regardless of faith,” he said.
Former president Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, also sent his best wishes to the new pontiff.
“Habemus papam,” Biden wrote on social media, echoing the Latin words of “We have a pope” that precedes any new pope’s introduction at the Holy See. “May God bless Pope Leo XIV of Illinois.”
Ukrainian Catholics in Chicago and around the world have memories of Leo XIV’s predecessor, Francis, as the late pontiff told a video call of 250 young people gathered in Chicago, as well as the Donetsk region and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Resurrection in Kyiv, that ‘I must forgive as I have been forgiven. Each one of us must look in our own life for how we have been forgiven.”
Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, the Vatican nuncio to Ukraine, organized the online meeting.
“Forgiveness is very difficult,” Francis said to the online gathering in February. “We always try to wage war and respond to a punch with another punch… We have to forgive each other. Always.”