Before he became Pope Leo XIV, or Father Bob, he was the youngest boy in the Peuse of St. Mary's Peuse, on the far end of the tropical borders of Chicago.
The parish was bustling in the 1950s and 1960s when the future Pope and his family were parishioners there. All three siblings attended Parish School primary school. Their mother, Mildred, remembers sitting behind the family on Sunday mornings, was the president of the St. Mary's Altar and the Rosary Society, where she performed in the play.
“They were always there,” Nais said, adding that “the community revolved around the church.”
Today, the old Catholic enclave on the south side of Chicago has essentially disappeared, institutions closed and parishioners are dispersed in the suburbs. St. Mary's hypothetical attendance has declined dramatically over the years, with the congregation merged with another diminished parish in 2011. In 2019 it merged with two other churches. The old St. Mary's building doodled behind the altar.
That transformation is in many ways an American Catholic tale, as changes in urban and suburban landscapes collided with demographic and cultural changes that fundamentally reshaped many Catholic communities.
“It's one of the great dramas in 20th century American history,” said John McGreevey, historian at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Paradise Boundaries: Catholic Encounters with Race in the Northern Century of the Urban in the 20th Century.”
Catholic parishes invested so much in physical infrastructure such as church buildings and schools that white Catholics stayed in the neighborhood longer than white residents who fled when blacks began to move in the mid-20th century.
“The Catholic parish was a neighbourhood anchor that didn't have white Protestant or white Jewish institutions,” Dr. McGreevey said. “When asked by a certain generation of Catholics, they would say, “Where did you come from?” They would say, “I am from St. Barnabas,” “I came from the sacred name.”
Even in many changing Catholic neighborhoods, white residents eventually moved.
However, during the booming postwar period in Chicago, Catholic families like Previst gathered together, attending the same parish, school and social events.
“The south side of Chicago, especially at the time, was very family friendly and very Catholic,” said Pastor Tom McCarthy, who first met Pope Leo in Chicago in the 1980s.
Fr McCarthy, who grew up in the Marquette Park area on the south side, said it was rare that the Pope was not Catholic in the area he grew up in.
“I only knew one non-Catholic family,” he said. “You went to Catholic school, you stayed in the neighborhood, you worked hard, and I think he's that product.”
Of course, Pope Leo XIV did not stay nearby. He enrolled at St. Augustine Theological High School near the Netherlands, Michigan. And when he climbed through the Catholic hierarchy, he lived abroad for long stretches in Peru and Italy.
Rob Parall, a researcher at the Great Citis Institute at the University of Illinois University of Chicago, said the south side of Chicago was a solid working class during Pope Leo's childhood. The family attended Southside Church, but they lived in Dalton, a suburb past the city line.
“It's far from the privileged suburbs of the North and West Chicago areas,” Parall said. “He really comes from grit and authentic Chicago. He's exemplified these days by the southern suburbs, just like everything in the city.”
The area can be explained in part by what is not, Parall said. “It's not beautiful and not lush,” he said. “You're talking about highways and industrial and railroad tracks.”
She said 50-year-old Donna Saguna lived next to the Pope's childhood home for about eight years.
She said she saw drugs on sale near the Pope's former home. People moved frequently, Sagna said, often to escape violence and crime in the neighborhood. She said no one knew that since Prevost Family Days, anyone still lived in the block.
The neighborhood has settled down in recent years, she said, and she is excited to live next to a house with a remarkable history all of a sudden.
“I hope this brings some peace to the community,” Saguna said.
Saint Mary's assumption, a childhood parish of the Pope, grew rapidly in decades before Leo was born, surpassing two buildings, moving in 1957 to a third of the future Pope who was an infant. Interviews and church records show that the church was busy for the next few decades.
However, the building had structural issues and attendance began to decline. In 2011, then Archbishop of Chicago Francis George Cardinal wrote that the building was “inadequately repaired to the point it is not safe to use.”
He combined St. Mary's assumption with nearby parishes to order the buildings to be closed as the area “is economically depressed and the area's Catholic population is so small that it has insufficient resources to restore the church.”
Many of the Catholic institutions that the Prevost family had led to similar fates. Mendel's Catholic High School, where the pope's mother worked as a librarian and his brother attended high school, was closed in 1988.
The number of parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago fell from 445 in the mid-1970s to 216 by 2024.
In Dalton, in 1980, 94% of residents were white and 2% were black. By the 2010 census, 5% of Dalton residents were white and 90% black.
Pope Leo's mother died in 1990 in 1990, according to county records. His father, Louis, sold the family home in Dalton in 1996 almost 50 years later. He passed away the following year.
Real estate records show that the Pope's childhood home, a modest brick home on a well-maintained block in Dalton, sold for $66,000 last year. It was recently renovated and listed for $199,000. (This week, the real estate broker managing sales was pulled out of the market to consider raising prices.)
Marie Knowling, 86, who lives in four homes, described the neighborhood as quiet. She moved home in 1999.
“When I moved here, it was a lot of gangsters,” Knowling said. “But now it's a quiet and lovely neighborhood.”
Mitch Smith and Robert Chiarito Reports of contributions. Susan C. Beach Contributed research.
