Why 'da pope's' Chicago accent is so comforting to U.S. Catholics

ROME — Last week, Stephen Colbert, the famously Catholic former Chicagoan, surprised the world and himself when he got a bit verklempt while talking about the election of Pope Leo XIV.

“When I heard it was an American pope, I was strangely moved,” Colbert, who attended Northwestern University and also is an alumnus of Second City, told his guest Jesuit priest, bestselling author, and chaplain to “Colbert Nation,” the Rev. James Martin.

“I didn’t expect that to be a moving thing, but I … got choked up when I heard,” Colbert said. “And then when I hear him speak not just English but American English, Midwestern English — it changes my image of the pope.”

Colbert is hardly alone in his visceral response to the pope's distinctly Chicago accent.

“He sounds like me, grew up in a similar neighborhood, just a different part of town — it's crazy,” said Eddie Ryan, 58, a lifelong Chicagoan and cradle Catholic who was in Rome last week celebrating his honeymoon with wife Noreen Fahey. The newlyweds attended the papal inauguration on Sunday before heading to Ireland.

Ryan grew up in a robust Irish Catholic family on the North Side. His Chicago Irish bona fides are deep, including his grandfather, Tommie, who founded the Shannon Rovers Pipe Band, and his father Bob, who has been the announcer of Chicago’s downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade for decades.

Since Leo’s election May 8, “I’ve been thinking about my journey to faith,” Ryan said while his beloved Cubbies were busy besting the pope’s White Sox as the first night of the Crosstown Classic played on the television behind him in The Highlander Pub in Rome.

“I went through a divorce and now I’m not technically allowed to take Communion,” Ryan said wistfully. “I’m this Chicago guy who was trying to figure this out. I still want to believe in what Jesus taught and said and his philosophy and how he had a lack of rules, and how we have a lot of rules now. And then this hope shows up from Chicago.

“The Chicago pope,” Ryan said, “I'm opening my mind up to where that can go and where it would take me.”

During their conversation on "The Late Show," Colbert asked Martin how important hearing “an American pope speaking to them in their own vernacular” would be to American Catholics.

“Hugely significant,” Martin answered. “We tend to see the pope as, ya know, somewhat distant; he speaks with a whatever kind of accent — Spanish or Italian or whatnot — and to hear someone really preach the Gospel in your own accent, it’s incredible.

“I heard him talking in English the other day and I thought, ‘Is this guy the pope?’” Martin said. “And the answer is, yes. He is the pope. It’s great. It brings the Vatican closer, and it brings the church closer.”

How someone says what they say provides all kinds of information about who they are and from whence they came, geographically and otherwise, said Melissa Baese-Berk, professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago.

“Language is super powerful like any aspect of our identity,” Baese-Berk said. “Language in some ways is like a very familiar smell that smells like a grandparent or something and can transport you to a time and place in your life….[Language] surrounds us everywhere that we are, and it signals so much about who we are.”

Language and dialect signal a sense of home and in the context of the Catholic church, something most people connect with their home parish, she said. So, when the leader of the church in Rome sounds like a guy who grew up in St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Dolton — because he did — those hearing familiar tones and cadence when he talks may even feel a deeper sense of connection to the Vatican.

“Our brain likes things that are familiar,” Baese-Berk said. “That familiarity can...set off a chain reaction of physiological comfort responses that are baked in from when we're tiny kids and we hear our mother's voice, and that is the thing that calms us.”

For millennia — until the 2013 election of Pope Francis, who was from Argentina — “there was always sort of a foreignness to that hierarchy,” she said. “And now there's something that feels very [familiar] just from the fact that there's a person who sort of sounds like home to a lot of people, or if not home, at least sounds really familiar because the Chicago accent is something that's so familiar to people from 'Saturday Night Live,' movies, and TV.”

Da Pope, indeed.

“I feel like when I look at Pope Leo, I see a hundred of him in Chicago — he looks just like us — and when he speaks English, he sounds like us — it’s really cool,” said Charley Snell as he toured St. Peter’s Square with his wife Evelina a day before the papal inauguration Mass on May 18. The couple are parishioners at Saints Faith, Hope and Charity in Winnetka.

“It’s made it so real and so personal,” Evelina Snell added. “It’s very joyous.”

“I’ve been involved in Catholic Relief Services in the past, but I’ve been on the fence about it (lately) with all that’s going on in politics. It’s just so overwhelming right now,” Charley Snell said. “Now with Pope Leo coming in … I have a CRS group on the North Shore, and I told my wife, now I’m going to get back in.”

Language and how it’s used shapes not only the way we feel but also how we think, said Viorica Marian, professor of psycholinguistics at Northwestern University and author of the new book “The Power of Language.”

“So, it's not surprising that when we think about the pope using English and Spanish and Italian and Latin — this ability to use multiple languages is shaping how the listeners both feel and think about the things that they hear the pope speak to,” Marian said.

“The pope’s ability to speak English as a native speaker and with a dialect that people can connect to will build this direct thread — a direct bridge to the American listeners and audiences, both Catholic and beyond Catholics, Christians and the general population as well,” she said. “It may revive and bring new generations into the fold that have not felt a connection to … the Vatican.”

Ryan Cleary, 20, of Lincoln Park, is a junior studying sports leadership and management at Miami of Ohio University who just completed a semester studying in Luxembourg.

“I extended my stay because I really wanted to make it here to Rome,” he said last week while he rooted for the White Sox a few stools away from Eddie Ryan at The Highlander.

“First of all, just being an American — I think that’s huge,” said Cleary, whose father, like Pope Leo, is a Villanova grad. “The representation is great.”

Before coming to watch the Crosstown Classic, Cleary had spent much of his day touring the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica, where he chose to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation with an English-speaking confessor. Going to confession is not something he does regularly, at least not since his days at St. Ignatius College Prep on the Near West Side.

“Why not do confession at the Vatican?” he said. “Today, it was a lot grander. I hadn’t gone to confession in a long, long time. I had a lot more to say. ... Walking out, you feel like an entire weight has been lifted off your shoulders."

To many, the pope formerly known as “Father Bob,” seems like a regular guy, the kind who will “get” other regular folks. He speaks their language, at least metaphorically, whether they’re Americans, Chicagoans, or not. For some, that is a comfort in tumultuous times.

“Now you can walk up and say, ‘That guy’s a jagoff,’ and the pope is gonna know exactly what that means,” Ryan said, laughing, while his bride, Fahey added: “There’s only one place that word is used — Chicago!”

Cathleen Falsani, the Sun-Times religion reporter and columnist from 2000-2010, covered the installation of Pope Leo XIV for Chicago Public Media.