By Simone Orendain, OSV News
CHICAGO (OSV News) — Since Aug. 22, Chicago White Sox fans have been able to easily spot the stadium seat where Pope Leo XIV sat when he watched the first game of the 2005 World Series.
The team put a plaque and markers including the pope’s image on the back of the forest green seat in row 19 of section 140 inside Rate Field on Chicago’s Southside.
“Not only the historical significance of the first pope from the United States, but just the historic significance of any time a new pope is elected and announced, it’s such a momentous occasion,” explained Christine O’Reilly, the White Sox vice president for community relations.
“And the fact that Pope Leo — Father Bob, Bob from (suburban) Dolton — who happened to be a White Sox fan, who happened to be at game one of the World Series, it all just really was something that we couldn’t help not only embrace, but to memorialize,” she said. “So that all of our fans could see it and really share in the overall excitement.”
According to her, tracing back the now famous image of the pope sitting in the stadium, of then-Augustinian Father Robert Francis Prevost (or Father Bob as many called him) dressed in his team’s colors of black and white, was a low-tech endeavor. There was no digital image shot with a smartphone with embedded data, and no need for exact coordinates.
Instead, O’Reilly described, the in-house video camera captured on the big stadium screen Father Bob sitting next to a father and son of a family that to this day still has those same season seats to the White Sox games. After the game, friends inundated the father, Ed Schmidt, with messages on his home phone that they saw him watching the game.
Then, she said, years later when all of Chicago was chattering about their homegrown pope once he was elected May 8, someone mentioned seeing him and Schmidt on those few seconds of video.
“So it was a matter of just going and reviewing the game broadcast footage because they knew from other people telling them that they had seen them on TV,” O’Reilly told OSV News. “And of course, they knew where their season tickets were. So that’s how we were able to determine the actual seat location that then Father Bob, now Pope Leo XIV, was sitting in at the time.”
Having a hometown pope, said O’Reilly, a Catholic, makes the Chicago metro area with a population of 9.4 million feel like a “small, intimate, large city” where people have connections to one another.
She said Pope Leo is “very, very close, dear friends” with the Schmidts through St. Rita High, an Augustinian-run school on the Southside where he substitute taught and would visit often as superior of the order’s Midwest province (1999-2001), and where Schmidt was an active board member.
Also, many of O’Reilly’s family members graduated from St. Rita’s. In one of her first positions with the Sox, O’Reilly said, she was in season ticket sales and sold Schmidt his first season passes.
Jim Keating, a diehard White Sox fan and lifelong Chicago Southside resident who lives a block and a half from the ball park can name a few of those close common connections to the pope too, especially during game one of the 2005 World Series.
He doesn’t personally know Pope Leo but “they had him on the big screen, apparently, right? You know, at some point, me and my wife were on the big screen, too, during the same game. It’s like, wild … you can’t make this stuff up.”
Keating pointed out his age, 70, which Pope Leo will be on Sept. 14. His daughter called him moments after the pope was elected and said her childhood friends started contacting her to tell her then-Bishop Prevost presided over their confirmations.
And Keating, a daily Massgoer who went to Catholic school from elementary through college added, “I’m retired, right? From law enforcement, but in the security job that I’ve had in the last couple years, we have done security details around his old house. It’s that crazy … because we’ve been working in Dolton, trying to protect some utility workers.”
The pope’s childhood home in the southeast suburb of Dolton is now in a city whose mainstay manufacturing industry died off, where crime has been common and Keating said robberies of utility workers happened regularly. Since his election, droves of visitors from the city and way beyond have been stopping at the house’s front yard to pray and take photos. And the city of Dolton bought the home in July with plans to turn it into a historical site.
In the years that included the White Sox last World Series win (2005), Pope Leo was prior general of the Augustinian order (2001-2013). Then in 2014, Pope Francis appointed him administrator then bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, where he had been a missionary in the ’80s and ’90s in the country’s mostly impoverished north and northeast. He then became cardinal in 2023.
On his regular visits home to Chicago, he would celebrate Masses (as recently as last summer) and as bishop preside over confirmations, ordinations and other prelates’ duties, catching the occasional game of his favorite baseball team.
For Richard King, another loyal White Sox fan from the Southside, the pope being a fan has been “fun.”
He said, “There are several people that have dressed like the pope at the White Sox game. So there’s all kinds of humor in this.” But he said personally, it has also had great significance for his family.
King told OSV News when the Archdiocese of Chicago first announced it would host a Mass in honor of Pope Leo’s election at Rate Field, his son urged him to go.
“And my son hadn’t been to church for a long time,” said King. “He asked me, ‘Are you going to that Mass for the pope?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ because nobody else was that I knew was going. He said, ‘Well, you should go.’ … I said, ‘You know what? If you go, I’ll go.'”
After a few days, King said his 41-year old son decided to go and he himself was elated that it happened to be Father’s Day weekend. Some friends gave him tickets “in a good spot because we were in the shade, so I didn’t have to sit out in the sun. Oh, it was perfect.”
Simone Orendain writes for OSV News from Chicago.
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