How the election of Pope Leo XIV brought a former Sun-Times religion writer back

I was driving friends to Belfast City Airport in rush-hour traffic the evening of May 8 when my phone began to blow up.

“What in the world,” I wondered aloud, trying to concentrate on the road while my passengers checked their news alerts.

“White smoke,” they reported from the front and back seats. “Sounds like there’s a new pope.”

I switched on RTE 1, the main news radio station in Ireland, where I’ve been living for the last 18 months, as breathless reports began pouring in from Vatican City.

By the time I dropped my friends off for their flight to Spain, the new pope was about to step onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to meet the world.

Ears glued to the radio, I heard a booming cheer from the crowd in Rome followed by a man’s voice reciting words of introduction in Latin, including the name “Roberto.”

To my best knowledge at the time there were four cardinals with the first name “Robert” or “Roberto.” Two were Americans — Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Cardinal Robert Prevost, a native Chicagoan and longtime missionary to Peru who’d been appointed to the Vatican’s dicastery of bishops in January 2023.

But it couldn’t be, could it? A pope from the United States would be spectacularly unprecedented.

In the weeks between Pope Francis’ death on April 21 and the opening of the conclave to elect his successor, there had been the usual low-key theorizing about “maybe an American,” but it wasn’t something most papal watchers took seriously. At least one of my colleagues on the religion beat had heard whispers about Prevost from a well-placed source a few days before the conclave but I didn’t buy it.

Wild speculation about papal succession has existed for millennia. Still, when white smoke appeared from the top of the Sistine Chapel that Thursday evening in May, the prevailing wisdom insisted there would never be an “American pope” because a supreme pontiff from a global superpower was, if nothing else, a bad look.

Still, the man had clearly said “Roberto.” And moments later the new pope’s surname was confirmed: “Prevost.”

“OH, MY GOD, IT’S THE CHICAGO GUY!” I shouted in my empty car, rummaging through the glove box for a pen and paper, the instinct to start reporting kicking in even though I had no one to report for at the time.

Muscle memory is a powerful thing.

Twenty years earlier, in March 2005, when I was the staff religion writer for the Sun-Times, I spent nearly a month in Rome covering the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.

When Pope John Paul II died after more than 26 years on the throne of St. Peter — the second-longest reign — his passing was not unexpected. He had been gravely ill for many months, and the last days of his life were marked by thousands of pilgrims keeping round-the-clock vigil outside his Vatican window.

We reporters had years to prepare. At the Sun-Times, I’d traveled to the Vatican on assignment twice before the death of John Paul II: in 2002 when he’d summoned the U.S. cardinals to the Vatican to deal with the global clergy sex abuse crisis and again in 2003 for the beatification of Mother Teresa. Both of those trips were dry runs to develop sources on the ground and navigate the Vatican media landscape for when the big story finally happened.

Back then, my remit from the editors was to get to Rome as fast as I could when Pope John Paul II died, not because we needed to report the details of his passing in person from the Vatican, but because we needed to secure hotel accommodations in Rome where they would be scarce. At the time, many broadcast media outlets had longstanding reservations — in some cases paying tens of thousands each month to rent out entire hotels, rooftops and parking garages for live shots of St. Peter’s that would air during the papal transition. If we wanted a room anywhere near the Vatican, I had to snap up whatever hotel reservation I could find and get there quickly.

Timing was so crucial, in fact, that for several years whenever I traveled abroad for pleasure, I always brought an extra “pope bag” filled with reference materials, notes, recording devices and other reporting necessities in case I needed to head to Rome from wherever I was.

When John Paul II died at 2:37 p.m., Chicago time on April 2, 2005, I was listening to live reports on NPR. I booked a hotel room immediately and, a day later, boarded an Alitalia flight with Chicago’s then-archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, bound for Vatican City and the biggest religion story in a generation.

In those days, nearly all print and broadcast media outlets in Chicago had reporters covering the religion beat full time. Many thousands of reporters descended on the Eternal City from all over the world. Millions of pilgrims packed Vatican streets to pay their respects to their beloved “Papa,” the man formerly known as Karol Wojtyla.

On the eve of his funeral mass, I spent the night on the cobblestone streets in front of St. Peter’s with a group of students from Chicago’s Loyola University who camped out to get a prime position to say goodbye to “Papa.”

What a difference a couple of decades makes.

I wrote my final column as religion writer for the Sun-Times in 2010. When Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world in 2013 by resigning — the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years — making way for Pope Francis, the first pope from the global south and from South America. I went to Rome again, covering the papal transition for the California newspaper where I was the staff religion columnist at the time.

Pope Francis’ election was a special story. His pastoral warmth, focus on the poor and efforts toward making the church more inclusive to historically marginalized people of all stripes made him a fast favorite globally, both inside and out of Catholicism. In his final years, Francis became a mentor to the Chicago priest who eventually would succeed him and brought him to live and serve at the Vatican.

But a Chicago pope? That story is in a league of its own. The biggest of big stories.

Back in Ireland the night of Pope Leo XIV’s election, I felt bereft. How could I not be in Rome for this epic story, the one I’d trained a lifetime to cover? I wanted to help tell it and more than anything else, I wanted to tell it for a Chicago audience.

So I sent a Hail Mary text to my old colleagues at the Sun-Times, offering my services if they wanted me on the ground in Rome.

Happily, they did.

My marching orders this time were to tell Chicago stories — how Chicago shaped Pope Leo, how his pontificate might shape Chicago, why it matters, why he matters and the myriad ways having a pope who sounds like the native South Sider and Sox fan he is could influence the way people around the globe experience Catholicism, faith and God.

Two days later, after checking into a last-minute pensione steps from the Vatican, I collected my official press credentials and hustled across the familiar cobblestones of St. Peter’s Square to the Pope Paul VI’s audience hall where the new “American pope” was about to meet 1,000 members of the world’s media for the first time.

In the earliest days of any papacy, every word, gesture or preference expressed by the new pope is analyzed for hints about what kind of a spiritual leader he will be. During that inaugural audience with reporters, Pope Leo was funny (he opened with a Dad joke). He seemed at ease and accessible. When a random guy in the VIP receiving line inexplicably handed him a baseball and a pen, the pope-formerly-known-as-Father-Bob signed it, but not before asking the crucial theological question: “Sox or Cubs?”

In the days that followed, enthusiasm and curiosity about Pope Leo XIV pervaded the conversations I had with Catholic and other religious leaders, colleagues and friends of the new pope and random people I met on the street, in restaurants and on at least one occasion at a basement bar playing a crosstown classic game between the Cubs and Sox.

Some expressed cautious optimism that the new pope and his Chicago moral compass might be the antidote to what they saw as widespread moral turpitude among other world leaders. Others talked about the opportunity Leo’s pontificate might afford them to revisit their abandoned faith or a church they felt didn’t really want them.

Most said they felt a different kind of affinity for the new pontiff, who seemed like much more of a “regular guy” than his new gleaming white vestments and office might indicate.

As I stood in St. Peter’s Square with a handmade sign that said “Chicago?” stranger after stranger stopped to tell me about their connection to Chicago or Pope Leo. Even when they didn’t speak much English, passersbys pointed, smiled and shouted, “Ah, Chicago pope, yes?”

Yes, indeed.

While I may have left Chicago years ago, it still feels like home, a place to which my heart is continually pulled and the neighborhood where my soul always feels like it belongs. It’s that kind of place. If you’ve ever left it, you likely know exactly what I mean.

The decade I spent at the Sun-Times was the most fulfilled I’ve ever felt professionally. I loved writing about and for Chicagoans. I missed it terribly (and I still do.)

What a joy to have the chance to go home again, if you will, and to do what I love in a way I didn’t think would be possible. I am profoundly grateful.

For Chicago and her second chances.