Pope’s childhood in a Chango Chicago tells a story of Catholic America

Before he was Pope Leo XIV, or even Father Bob, he was the youngest of the three Prevost boys in the benches of the parish of St. Mary of Assumption at the end of the southern border of Chicago.

The parish was animated when the future pope and his family were parishioners there in the 1950s and 60s. The three brothers attended primary school at the parish school. Their mother, Mildred, was the president of St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society, and played in pieces there, according to Noelle Neis, who remembers sitting behind the family on Sunday morning.

“They were still there,” said Ms. Neis, adding: “The community revolved around the church.”

Today, the former Catholic enclave on the southern side of Chicago has essentially disappeared, the closed institutions and the parishioners dispersed in the suburbs. The attendance at St. Mary of the Assumption has decreased spectacular over the years, and the congregation has merged with another declining parish in 2011. The combined parish merged with two other churches in 2019. The old St. Mary building fell into ruins, with graffiti scratched behind the altar.

This transformation is in many ways the history of Catholicism in America, while changes in urban and suburban landscapes have collapsed in demographic and cultural changes which have radically reshaped many Catholic communities.

“This is one of the great dramas in the history of the United States of the 20th century,” said John McGreevy, historian of the University of Notre Dame and author of “Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Rounat with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban”.