Before Pope Leo XIV, or even Father Bob, was the youngest of three boys to take the bench in the parish of the Virgin Mary at the far edge of the southern border in Chicago.
The parish was busy when the future Pope and his family were parishioners at the age of 50 and 60. All three brothers attended elementary school at the parish school. Their mother, Mildred, was the president of the altar of the Virgin Mary and the Rosary Society, and according to Noelle Neis, who remembers that he is sitting behind his family on Sunday morning.
“They were always there,” said Mrs. Neis, adding, “The community was spinning around the church.”
Today, the old Catholic enclave on the south side of Chicago has basically disappeared and the institutions closed and the parishioners dispersed in the suburbs. Participation in St. Mary of the Assumination has declined dramatically over the years and in 2011, the Congregation teamed up with another reduction parish. In 2019, the combined parish teamed up with two other churches. The old building of the Virgin Mary got into the emergency choir, while the graffiti climbed behind the altar.
In many ways, this transformation is the story of Catholicism in America, because changes in the urban and suburban landscapes have encountered demographic and cultural shifts that radically transform many Catholic communities.
“It is one of the great dramas of the American history of the 20th century,” said John McGreeva, historian at the University of Notre Dame and the author “Parish Border: Catholic Meeting with Race in the North of the Twentieth Century.”
Given that Catholic dioceses have invested so strongly in their physical infrastructure, including church buildings and schools, White Catholics often remained in their neighborhoods longer than the white people who fled when blacks began to move in the mid -20th century.
“Catholic parishes were neighboring anchors in a way that was no white Protestant or white Jewish institution,” said Dr. McGreeva. “When the Catholics of a certain generation were asked:” Where are you from? “They would say,” I’m from St. Barnabas, “” I’m from the Holy Name. ” ”
Even in many changing Catholic neighborhoods, white residents eventually moved out.
But on the prosperous days of the post -war Chicago, the Catholic families group grouped together and attended the same parishes, schools and social events.
“The south side of Chicago, especially at that time, was very focused on the family, very Catholic,” said Reverend Tom McCarthy, who first met Pope Leo in Chicago in the 80s.
McCarthy’s father, who grew up in the neighborhood of Marquette Park on the south side, said it was unusual, that he was not Catholic in the area where the Pope grew up.
“I only knew one family that wasn’t Catholic,” he said. “You went to Catholic schools, you stayed in the neighborhood, worked hard, and I think it is the product.”
Of course, Pope Leo XIV did not stay in the neighborhood. He enrolled in St. Augustine Seminary High School near Holland, Mich., Internal school for boys. And when he performed through the Catholic hierarchy, he lived abroad after long sections in Peru and Italy.
The Chicago south side was firmly working during the childhood of the Pope Leo, said Rob Paral, research worker of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago. The family visited the South Side church, but lived in Dolton, a suburb just behind the city line.
“It’s so far from the privileged suburbs of the North and Western Chicago area,” Paral said. “It is really from gravel and real Chicago, which is nowadays an example of the southern suburbs, such as anything in the city.”
The area can be described partly by what it is not, said Mr. Paral. “It’s not nice, not leaf,” he said. “You are talking about highways and industrial and railway lines.”
Donna Sagna, 50, lived beside the Pope of Children’s Home for about eight years, said, in a period that was sometime worried about the block.
She said she saw drugs sold near the former Pope. People often moved, Mrs. Sagna said, often to escape violence and crime in the neighborhood. She said she knew about anyone who still lived on the block of family days prestige.
The surroundings have felt calmer in recent years, she said, and she is enthusiastic that she lives next to the house with a sudden history.
“I hope it will bring peace to the community,” Mrs. Sagna said.
Pope’s Children’s parish, St. Mary of the Assumination has grown rapidly in decades before the birth of Leo, growing two buildings and moved to a third that was opened in 1957, when the future Pope Toddler was. According to interviews and church records, the Church was busy and active in the coming decades.
However, the building had structural problems and the participation began to decline. In 2011, Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, wrote that the building “The building is in such a state of bad repair that it is not safe.”
Combined St. Mary assumption with the nearby parishes and ordered the building closed because the area “is so economically depressed and the Catholic population in this area is so small that there are insufficient resources to repair the church.”
Many of the Catholic institutions that the family was associated with to meet similar fates. Mendel Catholic High School, where the Pope’s mother worked as a librarian and his brothers, went to high school, closed in 1988. Elementary school in the southern suburb of Chicago Heights, where his father served as director closed two years later.
Number of parishes in Archdiocese in Chicago he had refused to 216 to 2024, from 445 in the middle of the 70s.
In Dolton, 94 percent of the white population were black and in 1980 it was black in 2010.
Pope Leo’s mother died in 1990. According to regional records, he sold a family house in Dolton in 1996 after almost 50 years. He died next year.
According to real estate records, the Pope’s Children’s Home, a modest brick house on a well maintained block in Dolton, last year for $ 66,000. It was recently reconstructed and listed against $ 199,000. (This week, real estate broker managing sales pulled it off the market You want to consider an increase in price.)
Marie Nowling, 86, who lives four houses away, described the surroundings as quiet. In 1999 she moved to her house.
“When I moved here, it was wild, a lot of gangs,” Mrs. Nowling said. “But now it’s a quiet, nice neighborhood.”
