![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/Dolton_Municipal_Building_4534670751.jpg\")
Our new pope is from Chicago.<\/p>\n
Or maybe not, depending on definitions.<\/p>\n
After all, his childhood home is in Dolton, though his childhood church was on the far south side of Chicago.\u00a0 Yet he attended high school at an old-school minor seminary in Michigan, then went off to Villanova for college, attended seminary in Chicago, and spent a number of years at various assignments in the Augustinian order, and, while he returned to suburban Chicago (Olympia Fields) from 1987 to 1988 to be vocation director and missions director of the Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, and again from 1998 to 2001 as Prior Provincial (Wikipedia<\/a> is confusing on this point and I\u2019m not actually sure whether he was again actually based in Olympia Fields but the Midwest Augustinians\u2019 website<\/a> gives a far south side Chicago address so perhaps they moved from Olympia Fields to Chicago in the meantime), those were assignments within the Augustinian order, not as a Chicago parish priest, so his concerns would have been broader and engagement with everyday Chicagoans and his contacts with Chicago politicians far more limited, if at all, compared to Cardinal Cupich.<\/p>\n Does he nonetheless retain a certain affection for the city and feel that\u2019s where his roots are?\u00a0 That\u2019s surely further complicated by the nature of Dolton itself.<\/p>\n There are many suburbs where, had he had grown up there, he might come back and feel things are relatively unchanged. But Dolton?\u00a0 In his childhood, as described in articles I\u2019ve read but didn\u2019t bookmark, it was the sort of place filled with neighborhoods of traditional Catholic families, with boys as altar servers, Friday fish fries, and solid working-class communities.\u00a0 But his childhood church was closed down in 2000-ish, to be merged with another, and that church was merged with two others in 2011, and the demographics of the new church, well, they\u2019ve changed, just as much as the area has changed.<\/p>\n Here are the key numbers from Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n Pope Leo was born in 1955.<\/p>\n In 1950, Dolton had a population of 5,338.<\/p>\n In 1960, the town\u2019s population had mushroomed to 18,746.\u00a0 It further grew to 25,937 in 1970, the peak census year.<\/p>\n In 1980, the town\u2019s population was 94% white and 2% black; excluding the 3% potential \u201cwhite Hispanic\u201d, that\u2019s still at least 91% white.<\/p>\n In 2020, the population was flipped; 90% black and 3% white (with 4% Hispanic), with the population shift occurring in the 80s and 90s.<\/p>\n Also, the crime rate is high \u2013 rated a \u201cD\u201d by crimegrade.org<\/a>.\u00a0 And its economic well-being is low; formerly a town of factories and plentiful blue-collar jobs, they have largely dried up.\u00a0 Dolton up until now had most recently made the news for its corrupt mayor.<\/p>\n Looking at Statistical Atlas<\/a> gives more info:\u00a0 the few white residents who remain are disproportionately old, that is, above age 65, and among young adults and children, there are some age groups with only small slivers of white residents in the chart.\u00a0 There are considerably fewer married couples and far more single moms than the Illinois average.\u00a0 \u00a0The median household income is $44,500, compared to $59,000 for all of Illinois, and ranking 8th from bottom among about 55 Chicago towns (this was based on my counting them up one-by-one).\u00a0 Honestly, Dolton\u2019s not great, but despite the whole issue with its corrupt mayor, it is a notch above the poor south suburbs of Robbins ($30.5K), Gary ($28.9K), and East Chicago ($27.3K) and the dirt-poor suburbs of Ford Heights ($23.2K) and Harvey ($21.9K), so that\u2019s at least something.<\/p>\n In addition, the unemployment rate is high \u2014 15.8%, vs 5.3% for all of Illinois.\u00a0 The rates are especially high for young adults \u2014 38% for ages 20 \u2013 21, 29% for ages 22 \u2013 24, and 26% for ages 25 \u2013 29 \u2014 and in these age ranges far more men are unemployed than women, with a gap of about 20 percentage points in the employment rate.\u00a0 Also, 28.9% of the population is on food stamps, compared to 13.3% statewide.<\/p>\n This is all context for the reports<\/a> that the mayor of Dalton wants to buy the Pope\u2019s childhood home, which the current owner had purchased and remodeled in a \u201cflip\u201d, then pulled off the market immediately after the announcement of the new pope, and now has placed up for auction, with a reserve\/minimum price of $250,000, or $50,000 more than his prior asking price.\u00a0 Ironically, the house would have actually had more value before the flip, as it appears that it was in its original condition then, and is now just a generic white remodel.<\/p>\n But what would the significance of his birthplace be?<\/p>\n Many years ago, in a stretch of doing genealogical research, we identified my mother\u2019s childhood home from census records, then tried to find it on a map.\u00a0 Turns out, it no longer exists, and appears to have been knocked down to build a highway, though we\u2019re not entirely sure as so much of that area is gone that it was difficult to figure out where it would have been.<\/p>\n Pope Leo\u2019s childhood home still exists as a structure.\u00a0 But the neighborhood he grew up in, the environment that was a part of his vocation to the priesthood, which may have in some way contributed to his perspectives, shaped him as a priest, that\u2019s gone in many ways.\u00a0 I\u2019d seen the demographic changes attributed to \u201cwhite flight\u201d but (though I couldn\u2019t really find a lot online, since no one particularly cares about Dolton) I would guess that it was more a matter of the loss of jobs in the area leading existing residents to leave in search of jobs while at the same time, black Chicagoans moved outwards in hopes of a better life.\u00a0 But a neighborhood in which \u201ceveryone is Catholic and you see your friends and neighbors at church\u201d is far more rare than it was.\u00a0 It reminds me more of the neighborhoods profiled in Tim Carney\u2019s Family Unfriendly<\/em> as idealized family-friendly neighborhoods where no one needs to schedule playdates and where socializing requires no special planning.\u00a0 Of course, in 1955, living in such a neighborhood was perfectly ordinary; now, that\u2019s an intentional choice, and one of the neighborhoods Carney profiled was a Jewish neighborhood where families clustered together because of the need to walk to the synagogue.\u00a0 Ironically, the closest Catholic equivalent these days are probably neighborhoods which have sprung up around Latin Mass parishes, as people look to live near like-minded Catholics.\u00a0 But there\u2019s little value in living \u201cnear\u201d a relatively-recent suburban-style Catholic church, when it\u2019s not within a subdivision but requires driving no matter what.\u00a0 Even in my neighborhood, there were far more Catholic families on the block when we first moved in 22 years ago than there are now; used to be our block-away-from-church location meant there were a steady stream of kids walking to school in the morning but that\u2019s gone now as the school size has shrunk and the remaining families don\u2019t seem to have particularly prioritized walking distance in their home-buying decisions.<\/p>\n So what meaning would a visit to his home impart?\u00a0 A few displays about his childhood would serve only to highlight the loss of cohesive communities since then, whether due to the unintended consequences of \u201cplanned communities\u201d which absorbed their residents, or due to deindustrialization, or due to racism, or indeed due to \u201cwhite flight\u201d at whatever tipping point resulted in white residents leaving because of the demographic change (or because of crime rates).\u00a0 Or perhaps, depending on the angle taken by the display-creator, it would tell a different story, and take the Pope\u2019s apparent mixed-race ancestry<\/a> to construct a narrative in which his parents had to \u201chide\u201d their \u201cblackness\u201d (labelling the, and the Pope himself, as black due to the one-drop rule, that is) because of racism.<\/p>\n