At Chicago baseball stadium, Pope Leo makes his first pitch to America
At Chicago baseball stadium, Pope Leo makes his first pitch to America
Chicago’s elation over the hometown boy’s election led to a huge party for the first U.S. pope, who will begin to chart his historic path.
June 14, 2025 at 9:00 a.m. EDT5 minutes ago
5 minSummary
Pope Leo XIV wears a Chicago White Sox cap on the day of a general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on June 11. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)
By Michelle Boorstein and
CHICAGO — Pope Leo XIV — known here as Bob Prevost from the South Side — will address a packedbaseball stadium Saturday, greeting a U.S. audience directly for the firsttimeand offering a glimpse of the potential impact of the first American papacy.
More than 30,000 tickets were claimed for the event at Rate Field, the South Side home of the White Sox. The event, organized by the Chicago Archdiocese,is billed as a celebration of Leo and his hometown, and it will include a performance by a local Catholic school boys’ choir currently on “America’s Got Talent.” Chicago Bulls announcer Chuck Swirsky will serve as emcee.
The event, which features a 7½-minute videotaped greeting from Leo, is in some ways a love letter to Chicago and Catholics here — and definitively makes clear after some post-conclave social media debate that the pope favors the White Sox over the crosstown rival Cubs.
It’s also the start of a groundbreaking papacy. Leo is a dual American-Peruvian citizen who has lived in Rome for more than a dozen years and is fluent in five languages. Thousands in the stadium and those on the live stream will watch on screens a pope speaking with a Midwestern accent at a stadium dedicated to America’s classic athletic pastime.
His only official action as pope concerning the United States, so far, was naming a new bishop to San Diego last month. In a letter this week, Bishop Designate Michael Pham, a Vietnamese refugee, invited priests and faith leaders to “stand in solidarity” with migrants making court appearances.
The event comes the same day as President Donald Trump’s military parade, the largest in D.C. since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, and an organized day of protests in over 2,000 cities dubbed “No Kings Nationwide Day of Defiance.”
“He is a kind of a vessel we’re all pouring our hopes and expectations into until this papacy takes shape,” said Steven Millies, a professor of Public Theology at Catholic Theological Union, a Chicago school where Leo studied divinity. Millies was a member of the archdiocese’s committee that planned the Leo celebration.
Organizers hope they accomplish three goals: offer ecstatic Chicagoans a chance to celebrate, introduce multiple aspects of Leo’s Chicago life and offer a modern event of meaning. The four-hour event will include spiritual singing, celebration of Mass and, at its core — organizers say they hope — a down-to-earth pope.
“We’re in a moment in American culture where people are spiritually seeking and looking for meaning and purpose and oftentimes we think of the pope as sort of not quite human, as some kind of mystical figure and he’s somewhat irrelevant because he’s not like us,” Brian Romer Niemiec, a member of the event committee and coordinator of the archdiocese’s Office for Catechesis and Youth Ministry, told the archdiocesan news site, Chicago Catholic. “If this moment can make the pope seem like he is like us, he is one of us, I think that helps a lot of people who are trying to figure out: ‘Is there more to life than this? What is my purpose? Where do I belong?’”
Leo is likely to avoid political issues in his address and instead focus in particular on uplifting young people and encouraging them to find solace and hope in faith and community, according to those involved in planning the event.
Kathleen Sprows Cumming, a University of Notre Dame historian, said Leo probably will be very cautious as he juggles not sounding too American in a global Church where the U.S. is considered by many disproportionately wealthy and powerful.
Some people are likely to contrast the military parade with the celebration of the pope in Chicago, Cumming said.
“I think of course people will see it as a contrast, even if it wasn’t deliberately staged that way,” she said. “These are two very different embodiments of America. … Two very different expressions of America.”
A month into his papacy, Leo has been cautious in his comments about politics and government policy at an explosive time in the U.S. and other countries, several experts on the papacy said.
Leo was known during his decades in Peru as a powerful advocate for migrants and has spoken multiple times since becoming pope about the dignity of those who emigrate in search of safety or a better life. Since becoming pope, he has not specifically called out world leaders on their handling of the issue.
In Sunday’s brief homily in Rome, Leo spoke 11 times against “borders” — of the heart, between people and between nations. He called for God to “open borders, break down walls, dispel hatred.”
The Chicago event starts midday with 90 minutes of tailgating — apropos of a sporting event — before the official program begins at 2:30 p.m. local time. The event will be streamed live on the websites of the archdiocese and the White Sox.
By Michelle BoorsteinMichelle Boorstein has been a religion reporter since 2006. She has covered the shifting blend of religion and politics under four U.S. presidents, chronicled the rise of secularism in the United States, and broken financial and sexual scandals from the synagogue down the street to the Mormon Church in Utah to the Vatican.follow on X@mboorstein
By Kim BellwareKim Bellware covers national and breaking news for The Washington Post. follow on X@bellwak
