How we dug up the homegrown history of 'Da Pope'

Earlier this year I was paying zero attention to anything happening at the Vatican, a world away. But when Pope Francis got really sick, I got tapped to prep for what could happen next.

Big questions emerged. How many Catholic cardinals who vote on a new pope have Chicago ties, besides Cardinal Blase Cupich? Is there any remote chance that Francis’ successor would come from the United States, given the centuries it took for them to pick one who wasn’t Italian?

And then, if the princes of the church were ever going to venture out on a limb like that, my astute colleague Bob Herguth advised me back in February, there was one longshot possibility. A friend of Francis, a priest born in Chicago.

Robert Francis Prevost.

You know his name now. You know his favorite pizza place, his beloved baseball team, his penchant for the movie, "Ordinary People." But by early 2025, his name had appeared at suntimes.com in only three stories, under Herguth’s byline.

Back then, Catholic experts and scholars — Cupich among them — insisted that the time wasn’t right for any U.S. cardinal to be elected to the papacy. How could any of the American bishops, a group as philosophically polarized as the country’s electorate, hold together a worldwide Catholic Church?

This assignment was a weird detour for me. I’d barely written anything ever about the Catholic Church, though I was raised in Holy Family parish in Philadelphia. Still, as I gathered background on the three cardinals with serious Chicago ties ahead of the eventual conclave that would secretly elect a new pope, something stuck in my gears.

There was a chasm in Cardinal Robert Prevost’s official and otherwise impressive Vatican biography — utter blanks between his Chicago birthplace and his East Coast college.

From age 18 on, his path was clear. A series of advanced degrees. Years in Rome and in Peru. A local and international leader of Augustinian friars. Ultimately, an inner-circle post as Francis’ bishop-maker.

But I couldn’t lay my hands on two factoids Chicagoans like to start with when meeting someone new:

Where’d he go to high school? And which parish did the family belong to?

His Eminence did not respond to requests to discuss these details, no matter how polite my invitations.

Instead I’d have to dig up other sources to piece together a mosaic of his youth, begun 69 years earlier.

His name and birthday led to Cook County records that offered the first big clue: his parents’ names and the hospital where he was born — and two older brothers.

County deeds laid out the family’s path of home ownership from the Far South Side, through the shiny 1960s postwar enclave of Dolton on a $42-a-month mortgage for their tiny new brick house, and then on to fancier Homewood. His parents’ obituaries pulled from newspaper archives identified their occupations, pastimes and the name of the parish at the heart of the Prevost family: St. Mary of the Assumption, a onetime gem at the southern edge of the city.

An image emerged of an intelligent young man formed in a devout, middle-class baby boomer household and in a series of Catholic institutions around Chicago that have since closed down, been sold off or converted.

Yearbooks confirmed his brothers’ graduations from the former Mendel High School and showed their mother working in the library. But no sign of Robert. It turns out he’d gone away, to a seminary the Augustinians used to operate in Michigan.

His brothers declined to talk to me. But tidbits in a Facebook group from the old parish led to classmates who gabbed generously about the church and the charm of their hometown, tickled to think they had grown up alongside one of the holy men who’d pick the pope in the coming days.

As you know, the longshot manifested. White smoke revealed a historic first: The pope speaks American. Prevost becomes Leo XIV, six characters that Chicago was about to plaster all over the backs of shirts at Sox Park.

Staring at the TVs in the newsroom that day in May, this reporter stood dumbfounded, hot with nausea, face reddening with the stunned realization that the papacy had just become local news.

Plus, the world was about to jump on our story. My phone buzzed. I shook off the shock to prep for my first appearance on NPR to talk — live — about what I had uncovered about the future pope’s very relatable, very local beginnings, details you could only read in the Chicago Sun-Times.

But first, I’d call back his childhood pals from St. Mary’s who’d already dared to vocalize the possibility.

“To think about: We knew him when he was a kid,” a schoolmate told me. “He’s just like one of us.”