The
Chicago White Sox gave out Pope hats at the game Tuesday night.
Nearly 40,000 people packed Sox Park wearing papal hats, watching the White Sox play the team they should have beaten in the 1919 World Series, the Cincinnati Reds.
Nancy Faust came back to play the organ. There
were nuns and priests at the ballpark. There were enough Catholics wandering
around 35th and Shields that you half expected somebody to start selling raffle
tickets for a new parish roof.
The best part of Pope Night came when
Father Tom Hurley led 40,000 baseball fans in something that doesn’t normally
happen between a pitching change and a beer commercial.
The “Peace be with you.”
Something us Catholics say to each other
after the Our Father and before Communion.
Most Sox fans come from neighborhoods
filled with Catholic parishes and have heard those words thousands of times. Some
people at the game grew up saying Shabbat Shalom.
This happened at a place where there is
usually a couple of drunks getting into a fistfight, but
Tuesday night everybody was Catholic for about thirty seconds.
Peace be with you.
There is another Chicago connection that makes the whole thing even
better for me. Father Hurley’s brother is a good buddy of mine. That is Chicago
Catholic geography for you.
I know Father Hurley’s brother Dan. Father
Hurley leads the Sign of Peace at Pope Night. Pope Leo XIV is Bobby Prevost
from Dolton.
By my calculations, that puts me about
three handshakes from Saint Peter and Saint Peter is really where this story
begins.
I still get a giddy feeling whenever I
think that the Pope is a guy from Chicago who grew up a White Sox fan.
My usual reaction is a hearty laugh with
tears welling in my eyes as I shout:
“I can’t believe the Pope is from the F’ing
South Side!”
Then sixty years of Catholic guilt
immediately takes over.
“I’m sorry, Virgin Mary. I meant the South Side.”
But seriously, think about it.
This guy has the same job Saint
Peter had.
Robert Francis Prevost was born in Chicago
and raised in Dolton, belonging to St. Mary of the Assumption. Bobby served
Mass as an altar boy, and he went to White Sox games with his brothers.
Long before anybody called him His
Holiness Pope Leo XIV, he was Bobby Prevost.
And every one of us who grew up Catholic in
the Archdiocese of Chicago knew a guy just like Father Bob. We served Mass for
a Father Bob. We went to confession with a Father Bob. A Father Bob gave us our
First Communion. A Father Bob baptized our kids. A Father Bob buried our
parents and Father Bob stood at the altar when we got married.
There are Father Bobs all over Chicagoland.
From Bridgeport and Beverly, Oak Lawn and Evergreen Park, Cicero and Berwyn,
and from Pilsen and Old Town.
They coached basketball. They ran parish
carnivals. They drank coffee in the rectory kitchen, and they knew whose mother
was sick and whose father had lost his job.
They showed up at the hospital. They showed
up at the wake. They showed up when we needed them.
Some could deliver a homily that stayed
with us for days. Others put us to sleep before they finished the Gospel.
Father Bob Prevost was one of those
Chicago priests. Then one afternoon white smoke poured out of a chimney in Rome
and Father Bob from the South Side walked onto the balcony of St. Peter’s
Basilica.
That is when this becomes almost impossible
for a Chicago Catholic to comprehend. Because the story started two thousand
years ago with another regular guy.
Simon Peter wasn’t born a prince. He
wasn’t a Roman aristocrat. He wasn’t a polished theologian.
He was a fisherman, a struggling working
man. He was stubborn, impulsive and he often let his mouth overload his rearend.
And when shit hit the fan, he panicked and
denied he even knew Jesus. In other words, Peter would have fit in just fine at
a Southside parish.
Christ picked him anyway.
“You are Peter, and upon this rock I
will build my church.”
Catholics believe that moment began the
chain. Peter to Linus to Cletus to Clement and on and on.
Empires rose and fell, Rome collapsed, Columbus
crossed the Atlantic and America was born.
Chicago rose out of a swamp, burned down,
rebuilt itself, reversed a river, invented the skyscraper, and gave us mustard
on our hotdog.
Eventually the keys handed to Peter ended up
in the hands of an altar boy who grew up cheering for the White Sox.
That is why this Pope feels a little
different to us Chicagoans.
To more than a billion Catholics around the
world, he is the Holy Father. The Bishop of Rome. The successor to Saint Peter,
but around Chicago, we get to claim him as ours.
…And on a Tuesday night in August, 40,000
people gathered at Comiskey Park to celebrate him. Then a Chicago priest stood
in the middle of a baseball stadium and said four words Catholics have been
saying to one another for generations.
Peace be with you.
… And for that one night, it certainly
was.
Peace be with you Chalkheads.
