A papal pilgrimage through Chicago’s South Side
Billboards for a Culvers, Chuck E Cheese, and weed dispensary mark the exit ramp for the start of a very different kind of papal pilgrimage.
I eased my car off I-57 and navigated my way through the streets of the Windy City’s South Side, searching for a small brick house with a red door.
Like most other 1950 era homes, there is nothing remarkable about this house.
Except that Pope Leo XIV grew up in it.
This house was the launching point for my half-day papal pilgrimage through the South Side of Chicago — a quest to visit the landmarks and sites significant to Pope Leo XIV’s time in the city.
Before departing, I asked ChatGPT to generate a pilgrimage itinerary. I thought it might save me some time. The bot’s response began, “While Pope Leo XIV is a fictional pope (as there hasn’t been a Pope Leo XIV in history)…”
Maybe I am still smarter than Chat GPT, after all.
After doing some research, I put together an itinerary myself, so come along on Da Pillar’s Pope Leo XIV pilgrimage through da Sout Side of Chicago.
Stop 1: His Home - 212 E 141st Pl - Dolton, Illinois
If you ever want to visit Pope Leo’s childhood home, you’ll exit I-57 and drive straight down 144th street until you hit the Fairway grocery store. Turn left, and roll right past Chuck’s Gun Shop. Keep going until you see China Palace and Pizzas by Marchelloni.
Turn right onto 141st Place. The third house on the left should be the Prevost family home — look for the red door.
If you see the Express Drive Thru Food Mart and liquor store, you’ve gone too far. Sorry.
Dolton’s best days seem to be behind it. In fact, it feels downright sketchy.
The Prevost house is nothing special. The only thing that sets it apart are the two candles on the step and a wooden cross leaned on the side of the porch stairs.
A cop car sits guard outside, and the next door neighbor has an audio preacher reel on autoplay coming from a booming speaker.
It looks like any simple, suburban house. A nicely manicured lawn, hose on the side. That yard is where a young Bob Prevost played with neighbors and his two brothers. That house is where he learned about the faith, where his parents established their domestic Church.
Good Midwestern manners dictate you knock on the door to see if anybody is home. But when I did, no one answered.
Further research reveals that the house was on the market for $199,000 at the time of Pope Leo XIV’s election. Realizing who the former occupant was, the seller quickly pulled the house and put it up for an auction that will close June 18.
Currently, bidding starts at $250,000 for this three bed, three bath house.
News reports suggest the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Village of Dolton are working together to purchase the house and determine the best way to use it, but there are other bidders.
Talking to a nearby neighbor, Paola Lira, a Catholic woman who moved into the house across from the old Prevost family home in 2019, it’s clear she was unaware of who used to live across the street until pesky journalists started showing up asking for interviews.
“It is crazy and so exciting,” Lira said. “I still have not processed it.”
Her son, Daniel, said that every day, they see people from across the world coming to visit the house where the pope grew up.
All this attention, he believes, will help support and boost the neighborhood.
“It brings more people together in the community,” Daniel told me. “More people here are talking about him and talking about religion, but also we have a lot of people stopping by our tiny little neighborhood, which is great. Every day and every night people come to visit the house.”
Stop 2: The Church - South Leyden Avenue and East 137th Street
A half-mile away sits what used to be St. Mary of the Assumption Church. It sits right on the city line dividing Chicago and the village of Dolton.
For the authentic pilgrimage experience, you can walk from the Prevost house to St. Mary’s, tracing the route that young Bob likely would have made every day to attend school.
Google maps reports it is a 15 minute walk, but I did it in 12.
Wrong again, robots.
The path leads along Indiana Street, past apartment complexes and industrial warehouses. Trash litters the sidewalk and overgrown weeds cover the sidewalk. After crossing the second set of train tracks, you turn right onto Leyden Ave, where a sign for Dolton, Illinois will greet you.
If you keep walking past the Lutheran Church, there, on the corner across the street, is St. Mary of the Assumption.
Built in 1956, the church closed its doors in 2011 when the parish merged with Queen of the Apostles Parish. A local businessman, Joe Hall, purchased the property and was planning on turning it into a technical school.
But, as with Pope Leo’s childhood home, those plans may now change.
The church building is rundown, with overgrown plants running along both sides. A hole in both the roof and in the rose window at the front accent its deteriorating state.
When I got there, a cop car was faithfully sitting guard out front, ensuring that nobody tried to find a way to enter the church. I wandered to the left side, trying to find an opening, only to be greeted by a locked fence and boarded up door.
There’s a small window cracked open. I tried to open it further, only to find its rust-covered hinges have it locked in place.
Disappointed, I stuck my phone inside and started taking photos.
The interior is barren, stripped of any sacramentals or furniture. The walls are covered with graffiti, but the stained glass windows still allow beautiful ambient lighting into the interior.
Frustrated by the lack of accessible entry points, I wandered to the front of the building. There, I met two gentlemen, Dan O’Conner, a local Catholic, and Tommie Davis, a Christian minister who serves the Dolton community.
“There has been a buzz across the city and in the Church,” O’Conner told me. “People talk about Pope Leo’s election a lot and seem to be more interested in the church in general.”
“The day after his election, my pastor, who is a sports guy, was one of the guys arguing about which team he cheers for, and was elated to learn that he's a Sox fan.”
Davis has lived in the Dolton community for 36 years. While it is not a predominantly Catholic community, he said there has been a lot of talk and excitement around their new hometown hero.
“We had the world's most powerful man grow up right amongst us. It is something that you would never think would happen right here in your own front yard,” Davis said. “All the things that were going on with Dolton, all the negative things, and now everybody's trying to get this place back positive. Here we have the church where he actually started from and his childhood home. That’s just crazy.”
“Pope Leo’s is one of the homeboys from around the way.”
Davis thinks that being the papal hometown will have a tremendous impact on the local community.
“Economically, it's going to be incredible, it's taken effect already,” he said. “Infrastructure is changing. They are already trying to build a lot of stuff. Our new mayor and his administration is extraordinary. They have a lot of ideas on what to do. It seems like God said, ‘Okay, it's time to bless this community’.”
O’Conner, a lifelong Catholic, feels a special connection to the papacy, which he never experienced with other pontiffs.
“It is surreal, and that is how a lot of people have thought of it. The pope has always been this person that there is nothing tangible about, there is this distance,” he told me. “Then you learn, wow, this is a guy who grew up on the south side of Chicago. That is crazy.”
“I started working in this area a few months ago and one of the first things I did was drive around the district getting the lay of the land. And I saw this church and thought it was a cool old church. Then I learned that it was the pope’s church and that was just mindblowing.”
O’Conner told me he hopes that the Holy Father’s South Side roots will reinvigorate the faith of people across the city.
“I hope it reinvigorates Catholics across the city and sparks new interest,” O’Conner said. “I have a 19-year-old son who went to a Catholic high school on the South Side and in the past year he has been much more ‘Catholic curious’ than he has in the past. I think and I pray that having a local pope might double down on that Catholic curiosity for him and for others.”
A little while later, I wandered along a nearby walkway, which if you follow it leads to a barbed wire fence. Behind that fence sits a courtyard with a school. It’s St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic School, where Pope Leo XIV attended grade school.
It looks like most Catholic schools — eerily similar to my own — with a brick facade, plenty of windows and a cross on top.
Here, Bob Prevost sat learning amongst his peers in his parish elementary school.
That school would not be his last place of learning in Chicago. Off to our next destination.
Stop 3: The Midwest Augustinians - 10161 S Longwood Dr, Chicago, IL 60643
Ok, I made a mistake with this stop.
Pope Leo XIV never actually worked at the Midwest Augustinian province’s office here on the South Side. They moved into this location, a former convent, 10 years ago, after Pope Leo XIV’s tenure as the Midwest provincial general was over.
But going there, I did you a favor, really. You probably would have done the same thing. And since I’m just the intern, I should get some leeway.
It turns out the offices when Prevost lived in Chicago were located across the street from the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, where Pope Leo studied theology. The address is 5401 Hyde Park St. But it’s now a set of condominiums, so there’s not much to see, except the exterior.
But the current Midwest offices are worth your time, in the end — or at least they were worth mine.
After wandering for a solid half hour around the offices and the neighboring parish, trying to find somebody to talk to, I reluctantly returned to my car, frustrated that every Church employee decides that the weekend begins at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
Then I noticed an elderly gentleman sitting in a parked car. I wandered up to him to ask if there were any Augustinians around. He said no, they’d all left. I then asked if he knew Pope Leo. “Why yes,” the man said, “I worked at the high school he went to while he was there.”
He introduced himself as Br. Fred Kaiser, an Augustinian brother. He has been an Augustinian for 62 years and has crossed paths with Pope Leo XIV - to him, Bob - many times.
I guess an Augustinian was around, after all.
“Robert was an excellent student and a very empathetic young man. I think a lot of us at the time saw him as having leadership potential,” Kaiser said. “He was the kind of a kid who never got in trouble. In a lot of schools, seniors might be tough on freshmen. He was especially kind to the freshman.”
When Pope Leo XIV was introduced to the world on the loggia of St. Peter’s last month, Brother Kaiser sat astonished, in disbelief that his friend Bob was standing above the square greeting the world as Pope Leo XIV.
“‘I know that guy!’ I thought when I saw him come out,” Kaiser said. “It is weird to think this guy you know is leading the Church. He knows me, but I'm not gonna bother him for a while.”
At this point, another Augustinian, Brother Nick Mullarkey, who joined the order in 2012, came over and started chatting with us. I asked if he too knew Pope Leo XIV.
“I was blessed to live with him for a couple of months right before he became a bishop,” Mullarkey said. “I personally was sad, because I thought he was a great formator. And I had just taken my simple vows and I thought he was a great influence on me and then he was kind of plucked out of our house just a couple of months in, and so I was sad to see him go.”
Both Kaiser and Mullarkey believe that having an Augustinain as pope will do great things for the order.
“It kind of changes everything, the history of the order, the history of our province, it changes everything,” Mullarkey said. “There's already been an upsurge in vocation inquiries. If nothing else, it'll be very good for our parishes, our schools to enhance our Augustinian spirituality and say, well, it's the pope's spirituality, and he is a holy person.”
“One of these days, maybe I'll run into him again, and we will share some old stories,” Kaiser said.
“I would say, ‘Hi, Bob, it has been awhile!’ That is how I know him. I don't know him as Leo XIV. I think he's the kind of down-to-earth person who wouldn't be offended by me, not using his…title.”
Stop 4: Aurelio’s Pizza - 8162 Harwood Ave, Homewood, IL 60430
Since childhood, I have been a foodie. So naturally, I was very excited to go try Aurelio’s, rumored to be the pope’s favorite pizza place in Chicago.
I was even more excited to learn that they do not serve deep dish pizza - because I hate deep dish. Too much cheese, sauce and crust, and no balance.
I made sure to visit the Homewood location, where Bob Prevost would have gone.
Aurelio’s made it clear that they love the pope, too - with a sign out front that reads “It’s Official Pope Leo XIV Peace, Love, Aurelio’s Pizza.”
An old letter board outside displays the same message. So too do three more signs within the spacious restaurant.
I think these guys have just a little bit of papal pride.
Ducking inside, I discovered the papal pizza shrine.
There’s a picture of Pope Leo visiting Aurelio’s with friends and family during a trip to Chicago last August. It’s hanging beside two official papal portraits. And there’s a throne at the head of the table.
It’s pretty cool.
They sat me at the bar, allowing me to strike up a conversation with the bartender and a patron, who both describe Aurelio’s as the “hometown family pizza place,” saying, “It’s where you would go after any sporting event, birthday party or special occasion.”
Both the bartender and the patron had been visiting Aurelio’s since before they could chew pizza.
They both agreed that the pizza is delicious, “it’s the sauce that makes it,” apparently. They claim it’s one of the best pies in the city, if not the country. Doesn’t everyone?
My pizza arrived piping hot from an old stone, woodfired oven, which the bartender told me is used on request. He claims it’s the classic way the pizzas are made and better than their other industrial ovens.
Filled with anticipation, I took a bite. If I’m being honest, it was nothing special. It tasted just like every other hometown, family place pizza.
Actually, if I’m being brutally honest, it was a mid-level pie with way too much cheese, a weak crust, and if it’s “the sauce that makes it,” all it makes it is bland.
There’s a local affection for Aurelio’s, and now a papal endorsement. But this stop might be a little bit of Leo-themed hype. You can safely miss it.
Stop 5: Local Pub for Beer and the Sox
Pope Leo XIV loves the White Sox. At least, that’s what his brother says. So, clearly, any papal pilgrimage isn’t complete without a trip to a local bar to watch the Sox game.
I initially stopped by Burning Bush Brewery, where they have a “Da Pope” beer offering. Unfortunately, they were all out during my visit, so I wandered to a local sports bar to find a drink and catch the game.
I settled for a Budweiser, a true American beer made first by German Catholics, and watched with South Side locals as the White Sox lost to the Texas Rangers.
Clearly the pope needs to offer some extra prayers for his team — they need them. But in the meantime, if you want the truly authentic Pope Leo experience, watching the Sox get beaten after a so-so serving of beloved local pizza may be the best way to end the day. That’s what I did.
This Bud’s for you, Your Holiness.
"Too much cheese, sauce, and crust"—Jack, if you remove those, that's not a pizza, it's a sad bowl of toppings.
Turning the old parish into a technical school could be appropriate if Pope Leo make's good on his Catholic social teaching possibilities: Rerum Novarum Technical School. Workers of the world, unite!