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Before he was Pope Leo XIV, or even father Bob, he was the youngest of the three Prevost -boys in the banks in St. Mary of the Assumption Parish on the distant edge of the southern border of Chicago.
The parish was bustling when the future Pope and his family there were parishioners there in the 1950s and 60s. All three brothers went to primary school at the parish school. Their mother, Mildred, was the president of St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society and performed in plays there, according to Noelle Neis, who remembers behind the family on Sunday morning.
“They were always there,” said Mrs. Neis and added, “the community revolved around the church.”
Nowadays, the old Catholic enclave on the south side of Chicago has essentially disappeared, with institutions closed and parishioners spread in the suburbs. The turnout in St. Mary of the assumption fell dramatically over the years, and the congregation merged in 2011 with another shrinking parish. The combined parish merged with two more churches in 2019. The old St. Mary building was in disrepair, with graffiti behind the altar.
In many ways, this transformation is the story of Catholicism in America, because changes in urban and suburbs crashed landscapes in demographic and cultural shifts that have radically reformed many Catholic communities.
“It is one of the great dramas from the American history of the 20th century,” said John McGreevy, a historian at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “Parish Boundaries: the Catholic meeting with race in the twentieth-century urban north.”
Because Catholic dioceses invested so heavily in their physical infrastructure, including church buildings and schools, white Catholics often remained in their neighborhoods longer than white residents who fled when black people started moving in the mid -20th century.
“Catholic parishes were neighborhood anchors in a way that was not a white Protestant or white Jewish institute,” said Dr. McGreevy. ‘When Catholics of a certain generation were asked:’ Where do you come from? “They would say:” I am from St. Barnabas, “I come from the holy name. ‘
Even in many changing Catholic neighborhoods, white residents eventually moved.
But in the flowering days of the post -war Chicago, Catholic families such as the Prevosts have been clustered together, who attend the same parishes, schools and social events.
“The south side of Chicago, especially then, was very family -oriented, very Catholic,” said the Reve to Tom McCarthy, who first met Pope Leo in Chicago in the 1980s.
Father McCarthy, who grew up in the Marquette Park district on the south side, said it was unusual not to be a Catholic in the area where the pope grew up.
“I only knew one family who wasn’t Catholic,” he said. “You went to Catholic schools, you stayed in the neighborhood, you worked hard and I think he is a product of that.”
Pope Leo XIV of course did not stay close. He registered at St. Augustine Seminary High School near Holland, Mich., A boarding school for boys. And while he rose through the Catholic hierarchy, he lived abroad for a long time, in Peru and Italy.
The South Side of Chicago was solid working class during the youth of Pope Leo, said Rob Paral, a researcher at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago. The family went to a church from the south side, but they lived in Dolton, a suburb just past the city line.
“It’s so far away from the privileged suburbs of the North and West -Chicago area,” said Mr. Paral. “He really comes from the grit and the real Chicago, which is nowadays illustrated by the southern suburbs as everything in the city.”
The area can be partially described by what it is not, said Mr. Paral. “It’s not beautiful, not leafy,” he said. “You are talking about highways and industrial and railway tracks.”
Donna Sagna, 50, lives next to the pope’s house for about eight years, she said, during a period that has sometimes been worried for the block.
She said she had seen drugs being sold near the former Pope’s house. People often moved, Mrs. Sagna said, often to escape from the violence and crime in the neighborhood. She said she was aware of nobody who was still living in the block since the prevost -family days.
The neighborhood has felt calmer in recent years, she said, and she is very happy to live next to a house with a sudden remarkable history.
“I hope this will bring the community some peace,” said Mrs. Sagna.
The parish of the Pope Youth, St. Mary of the assumption, had quickly grown in the decades before Leo was born, two buildings outgrown and moved to a third that opened in 1957, when the future Pope was a toddler. The church remained busy and active in the coming decades, according to interviews and ecclesiastical data.
But the building had structural problems and the presence started to fall. In 2011, the Archbishop of Chicago at the time, Cardinal Francis George, wrote that the building is “in such a state of poor repair that it is not safe to use.”
He combined St. Mary of the assumption with a nearby parish and ordered the building to have closed because the area is “so economically depressed and the Catholic population in the area is so small that there are insufficient resources to repair the church.”
Many of the Catholic institutions with which the Prevost family was connected to meet similar fate. Mendel Catholic High School, where the Pope’s mother worked as a librarian and his brothers went to secondary school, closed in 1988. The primary school in the southern suburb of Chicago Heights, where his father was closed two years later as director.
The number of parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago rejected Until 216 by 2024, from 445 in the mid -1970s.
In Dolton, 94 percent of the residents were white and 2 percent were black in 1980. With the 2010 census, 5 percent of the inhabitants of Dolton were white and 90 percent were black.
Paus Leo’s mother died in 1990. His father, Louis, sold the family house in Dolton in 1996 after almost 50 years, according to the district records. He died the following year.
The Pope’s Childhood Home, a modest brick house on a well -maintained block in Dolton, sold last year for $ 66,000, according to real estate records. It was recently refurbished and mentioned for $ 199,000. (This week the real estate broker manages the sale it pulled it off the market to consider increasing the price.)
Marie Nowling, 86, who lives four houses away, described the neighborhood as silent. She moved to her house in 1999.
“When I moved here, it was wild, many gangs,” said Mrs. Nowling. “But it is now a quiet, beautiful neighborhood.”
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