The sheer Americanness of Leo XIV’s papacy was cut to its purest form, you might say, in early July of this year on the lawn of his childhood home in Dolton, Ill.
It came in two phases:
1. In an act of can-do Midwestern big-shoulders Chicago labor priest hammer-twixt-the-teeth Catholic charity, a company called Windy City Construction Group tore off and replaced the weathered roof of the former Prevost family home. The new roof is a lovely light gray; it looks clean and sturdy and good.
2. Windy City then planted on the lawn a six-foot sign declaring that they were the ones who did it, with two large QR codes directing you to the company website where you, too, can get your own roof replaced (not for free).
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.”
At the same time: While in theory I believe the Holy Spirit was at work in the conclave to elect this man pope, in actuality…? As a longtime Catholic, and as a more or less “official” Catholic—one in a religious order, one working in Catholic media—I think that belief can become a bit sterile. A preternatural skepticism, an impulse of doubt: Was the conclave just an examining of onboarding protocols and combing through H.R. files and coming up with a suitable candidate to move the enterprise forward in the coming fiscal years as revenues head south and key markets need priming? Was it that, and not necessarily a mystical decision by a prayerful gathering of men channeling the divine power of the universe?
Even though I was visiting Chicago this summer, I had not thought of going to the pope’s home until my editor suggested it. I quickly found on Google Maps, not joking, the “Pope Leo XIV Childhood Home” destination. I drove south down Lake Shore Drive, gliding past lakefront parks, beaches and baseball diamonds, listening to 93 XRT, the finest radio station in America. Alt-rock, ’90s rock, moody acoustic, Lord Huron, Amy Winehouse, “classic rock” but the cool, Tom Petty kind. It began to feel like a mini-pilgrimage. Stunning views, shattering music, Midwestern pontiff.
Dolton is a first-ring suburb of Chicago, immediately south of the city limits. While it is not technically in Chicago, it is of Chicago. To get there, I wound around the museum campus in the Loop—the Art Institute, the Field Museum, Millennium Park where that Bean thing is—toward I-55 South and then I-94 East to Indiana and eventually Exit 68A. I drove past a mix of weedy vacant lots and low-slung, barracks-like housing developments, with a few vacant buildings here and there. I crossed train tracks and went over an old rusted bridge on the Little Calumet River. I took video of the passing scenery as I went along, surprising myself by becoming more and more excited over the course of this little papal sortie.
I finally pulled onto East 141st Place. The street was quiet. A cat padded along the sidewalk. Lawns were well-kept. I pulled up behind a police car in front of the home in question, 212. It was 12:31 p.m. It felt important to note that.
There it was: the Prevost home. It was reddish-brown brick. A narrow concrete walk lined with weedy white rocks led up to a bright red door. The house was small, with almost a cottage feel to it. Wood chips lined the front of the house. Someone had leaned a bare wooden cross against the house next to the front steps.
Ever since it was discovered that the new pope had grown up here, a squad car has been stationed in front of the home between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day. On duty that day was Officer Ruffin, who told me that people come by all the time, praying and taking pictures. “Catholics take care of their own,” she said. She said that the block “feels more peaceful” since the pope was elected.
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.
It was steamy hot outside and reminded me of a long, dull summer afternoon at my grandparents’ wheat farm in Oklahoma. I cased the home, the backyard, the front porch. I inspected a green water hose. Why? I don’t know. It seemed important. A man named Ike drove his van over, “Ike’s Tire Repair” painted on his door. He got out, chatting with Officer Ruffin, whose tire he had once repaired. I took Ike’s picture in front of the house. He said about the new pope, “You never know how far you get if you have luck and hard work.”
The Nguyen family pulled up. Khuong and Hellen and their four small children and Hellen’s father had made a pilgrimage to the pope’s home from San Jose, Calif. “He is the first American pope in 2,000 years of the papacy,” said Khuong, explaining what drew them halfway across the country to Chicago.
“He gives us hope,” said Hellen. “We could use hope right now. He can help guide us to the right path, to make the church stronger.” We need hope, she said, because of “so many wars, secular culture and babies unborn and born.” She said we needed “someone to pray for us, to teach us.”
Dolton left behind
Dolton is a different place from when the pope grew up there in the ’50s and ’60s, an era when there was an abundance of jobs in nearby mills and factories. Through the ’80s and ’90s, steel mills and other industries were shuttered. The old, familiar story. The New York Times reported a complete flip of racial demographics in the Village of Dolton. In 1980, the population was 94 percent white and 2 percent Black. Thirty years later, in 2010, the ratio was 5 percent white and 90 percent Black.
As a report by WBEZ put it, the community was a victim of “a well-worn pattern of deindustrialization that leads to a disenfranchised economic class.” Dolton, in other words, lives at the peculiar American post-industrial matrix where the stuff of Bruce Springsteen songs became the seeds of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Kim Graham lives right around the corner from the Prevost home, showing up to see it for the first time since the papal election. She told me that Dolton needed a boost. The municipality had been in the national news spotlight the past year and a half over allegations of financial misconduct by former Mayor Tiffany Henyard.
Miss Graham hopes the discovery that the pope was from Dolton will help shift the spotlight. “It brings a good side,” to the city, she said. “It will enhance the presence of the other churches.”
She added, “It took something of the Christian faith to uplift the area.”
Kareem Davis stepped out of the house next door to the Prevost home. He had actually been trying to purchase this house, which abuts his, well before it became world famous. The interior of the Prevost house had been renovated last year, and the home was put up for sale (3BR, 3 bath, 1,200 square foot), listed at $199,000. On July 1, with some controversy given the city’s financial troubles, the Village of Dolton bought the home. It intends on making it a historical landmark. No one resides there now.
Mr. Davis, who grew up Baptist and with his wife Donna attends St. Sabina’s Catholic Church in Chicago, hopes the home stays as it is. “It should be a place of prayer,” he said. “A sanctuary, a place you could come and repent and let loose the things you have done with your life.”
He is concerned about what the new owners could do with the building. “The city might turn this into a circus, a money-making machine, and it will be struck down by the Lord. He don’t want that.”
Mr. Davis said his faith has grown because of where he lives. “That happens when God shows something to you. You can’t ignore it. This entity of your Lord has struck right here.”
The six-foot white sign in front of the Prevost former home features a lovely portrait of Pope Leo, formerly Cardinal Prevost, formerly Bishop Prevost, Prior General Prevost, Father Bob Prevost and Rob from Mary of the Assumption. (The QR codes? Okay, roofers have to eat.) An inscription beneath his portrait reads: “Every Great Story Has a Strong Foundation—A Roof for the Pope’s Roots.” Kate Christensen, who stopped by with her husband Roy, looked at Leo’s portrait on the sign and said, “Just looking at his face, you can see the peace in him and the holiness.”
The compact little Prevost home, the white shutters, the small green lawn. The cottageness of it. Humble and small. Almost heartbreakingly small. Not heartbreaking as in you feel bad for people living in small houses, just heartbreaking as in, when you look at it, you realize you have a heart—a heart for the South Side red brick Chicago Catholic 1950s 40-kids-to-a-nun thing. Mary of the Assumption and Daley of the Mayor and Mildred of the Rosary and Altar Society and Louis who served on a landing craft at Normandy (you cannot make this stuff up) kind of place. One whose foundation seemed to have been laid before all of creation for the first American pope to come from. And Peace be with you! said he first thing from the balcony. So drop your skepticism because this entity of your Lord has struck right here.
Related Stories