“What Has Made Chicago Catholicism Distinctive?” That ever-fascinating question opens Catholicism, Chicago Style (Loyola Press, 1993), a book published to mark the Chicago Archdiocese’s 150th anniversary. To answer it, the authors, Ellen Skerrett, Edward R. Kantowicz, and Steven M. Avella, cite the distinctive composition of the city’s ethnic diversity. Though the Irish made up a plurality (but not a majority) of Catholics, they were quickly joined by sizeable waves of German and Polish Catholics and later Bohemians and Slovaks from the Austrian Empire and then Italians, Lithuanians, and, in time, members from a dozen other nationalities. According to one theory, shepherding this flock of very different sheep produced a degree of openness—of live-and-let-live and even of risk-taking—that was unusual in the pre–Vatican II church. One might describe it in Leo’s phrase as “the coexistence of diversity.” 

There was room for both Marian devotions and Catholic crusades against atheistic Communism and immodest dress. But there were also speeches by Bishop Bernard Sheil that supported the labor movement and attacked segregation, antisemitism, and the right-wing demagoguery of his fellow Catholics Fr. Charles Coughlin and Sen. Joe McCarthy. The Sheil School of Social Studies was an outgrowth of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), Bishop Sheil’s citywide effort to reclaim urban teens through athletics (especially boxing). The Sheil School was a hotbed of social-justice activities. At the same time, Chicago was the home of the “specialized Catholic Action movements”: the Young Christian Workers, the Young Christian Students, and the Christian Family Movement. These were nurtured by Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, a pioneer of liturgical renewal, whose tenure as head of Chicago’s seminary produced a generation of priests who were social activists and community organizers. They joined laypeople in the Catholic Interracial Council, the Catholic Labor Alliance, the labor paper Work, the interracial Friendship House, and The Critic, a literary journal. Of the three young founders of a Depression-era Catholic Worker House, two—John Cogley and James O’Gara—became Commonweal editors in the 1950s while the third, Ed Marciniak, mentored Peter Steinfels, who joined the staff in the 1960s.

Chicago’s ethnic Catholicism was distinct in another way. From its beginning, it was not embattled with an entrenched establishment, as the Irish-led Church was in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. There were nativist slurs, of course, like the 1885 Chicago Tribune editorial Ellen Skerrett quotes: “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community, are Irish Catholics?” But that passed. The postwar Chicago Church I knew had none of the lingering defensive edge I’ve often encountered on the East Coast. Its mood was well captured by the title of Steven Avella’s study of its 1940–65 lay and clerical leadership, This Confident Church.  If Pope Leo seems to many like a man comfortable in his own skin, it may be partly because he grew up in a Church comfortable in its city.

Nothing stands still: post–World War II ethnic boundaries were already loosening during the pope’s childhood; second and third generations were moving to the suburbs. Yet, as John McGreevy’s Parish Boundaries attests, for both religious and ethnic reasons, Catholics were more stubbornly territorial than their Protestant and Jewish neighbors. The arrival of a growing Black population looking for better housing brought new racial tensions to old ethnic neighborhoods. Still, among postwar ethnic generations, a mix of kids went to parish schools and Mass together. (My own had Irish, Italian, German, and one—but only one—Black student). In sex-segregated high schools, young Catholics met and mingled through a rich schedule of sock hops, dances, and theater productions, along with an array of diocesan programs. Young Catholics could choose among a wide range of high schools, including Quigley, the boys-only diocesan minor seminary. Robert Prevost instead went off to an Augustinian seminary high school in Holland, Michigan, and eventually became an Augustinian friar. In the 1970s, he returned to attend the Catholic Theological Union, which was founded in 1968 by a consortium of religious orders and drew a varied student body of clergy, religious, and laypeople. The media have reported that on visits home, Prevost had summer jobs, taught at the Augustinian high school St. Rita’s, and perhaps mowed the lawn.

The family home where Prevost and his two brothers grew up still stands and is now in danger of becoming some kind of monument. The small brick house is a reminder of Chicago’s preference for single-family homes. A bungalow on a small plot of land, with yards front and back, represented the American dream. Dolton, the village in which the house stands, just over the city’s southern border, was once prairie land occupied by the Potawatomie, Sac, Illini, and Miami. Its more recent history tells a still-developing story. In 1970, Dolton had forty-two Black residents. By 2025, there were 21,000, representing about 90 percent of the population. Did Dolton’s proximity to Chicago’s South Side make it a suburban respite for Bronzeville’s crowded quarters? Perhaps Dolton and Chicago both prepared Fr. Prevost for the journey to Peru—and prepared Pope Leo for the challenges of a city, a nation, and a world facing the “coexistence of diversity.”