Opinion: My hometown pope

Yes, I cried when I heard that Pope Leo XIV is from Chicago. And I thought of St. Peter’s Church in Chicago’s Loop, where I used to go to Mass now and then.

It was usually a 5:30 Mass. Many attending were cleaning and maintenance people, already in their work clothes. They stopped in to pray on their way into work, as suit-wearing office workers from the skyscrapers passed them, heading home.

Marta, a cleaner in our office building, had told me about what was called “the cleaning crew Mass.” Marta was from Poland. When we all recited, along with the priest, “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…” you could hear accents around us from all over the world: Poland, Mexico, Italy, China, Lithuania, Ireland. It put a glimpse of the world into our words.

The Masses were not large. And so they felt personal, and the faces became familiar. Most of us were on our own, like Marta, stopping in to pray before her worknight began, or like me, at the end of a workday. When we gave one another the sign of peace—that part of the Mass where people reach out to those around them, clasp their hands, and say, “Peace be with you…”—I sometimes wondered where else could you share such a poignant moment with people from all over the world? We might have all prayed for different things, but wished each other peace in our lives.

I remember, too, the joy that Marta and others from Poland felt when Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, came on an official visit to Chicago, in 1979.  I put a rosary from Marta in my coat pocket when I covered the Mass in Grant Park, and when I returned it to her, she clutched it to her chest and said, “I feel him here.”

When Pope Leo XIV came out to speak from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday, I thought of that other St. Peter’s, in Chicago. The working people at those Masses today might see Pope Leo, once known on the South Side as Father Bob, and tell themselves, “He has walked among us.”