The Pope is a White Sox Fan

Why Leo XIV’s name shows he’s a New Dealer at Heart

credit: MLB.com

Why does this Jew love the new pope? Let me count the ways. After I do, I’ll tell you something about Leo XIV’s connection to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the Trump/Musk demolition project, which, as Bill Gates told the Financial Times this week, has led to “the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children.”

Every pope from 1523 to 1978 was Italian. Then we had a Pole, a German, and an Argentinian. Now we've got one of my homies. If you think it’s exciting to have an American pope, imagine how Chicagoans feel. It’s true that I’m a Cubs fan and Pope Leo is a White Sox fan (like Barack Obama), but those differences are not as great as they seem. When we were growing up (I’m two years younger), it was permissible to root for both teams. This is heresy now, with the schism between the two fan bases running deep. Maybe a bridge-building pope can help.

I’m from the North Side, close to Wrigley Field, but my grandfather grew up on the South Side, not far from where the new pope was raised. Grandpa Sol took me to Sox games and gave me a flannel White Sox uniform that I stopped wearing to school in Second Grade when my friends said I’d shown up in my pajamas.

Anyway, I went to several night games at Comiskey Park (Wrigley Field had no lights) and now imagine myself chasing foul balls with Rob Prevost in the mid-1960s. Never knew the guy, but it's fun to think of the potential proximity. When I was eight, my far-sighted mother took us to Comiskey to see the Beatles. I’m confident Rob (as his family calls him) wasn’t there that day because that 1966 concert was only four months after John Lennon said the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” Not cool in the Prevosts’ parish.

Beyond patriotic pride, I love the timing of this puff of white smoke. It represents a chance to call papal bull on Donald Trump and Catholic newbie J.D. Vance and their ethic of cruelty and contempt. Even a decent conservative pope like Benedict would have quietly validated their unChristian behavior. This was a close historical shave. The Catholic Church has always been authoritarian in structure, with a weakness over the centuries for strongmen. Pius XII wasn’t quite as bad during the Holocaust as I thought he was growing up, but he wasn’t good, either. And many cardinals in Latin America and elsewhere made common cause with dictators.

The new pope won’t. He’s a sensible liberal who, three weeks ago, retweeted a post slamming Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” He also retweeted a post reading: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.”

In 2017, then-Bishop Prevost reposted a message supporting DACA recipients, and the following year, he retweeted:

There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.

Take that, Opus Dei. Imagine how a rebuke from an American pope will land in American politics. Over time, we may find that Trump has met his match. Laura Loomer already called Pope Leo “just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” It didn’t play well.

The name any new pope selects is always meaningful. Pope Francis chose his name to honor Saint Francis of Assisi. Pope Leo XIV is clearly honoring Pope Leo XIII, whose famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“of revolutionary change”) rejected both socialism and unfettered capitalism and insisted on the natural rights of workers to form labor unions and receive a “just wage.” Rerum Novarum wasn’t Bernie Sanders’ platform, but it was close, re-writing the social contract by expanding the idea of what government and civil society owe each other.

Cut to Albany, 1932. Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state was a man named Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx. Flynn and FDR were so close that 12 years later, in 1944, it was Flynn who convinced the president to select Harry Truman as his running mate. As I learned while writing my book, Flynn was no Tammany Hall hack. He was a student of history and a practicing Catholic, and in the run-up to the 1932 campaign, he held a series of conversations with FDR about Rerum Novarum. At the time, Roosevelt “was a progressive vessel yet to be filled with content,” Rexford Tugwell, a member of his “Brain Trust,” wrote later.

(l) James Farley, DNC Chairman, FDR, (R) Ed Flynn, NY Sec of State, Election Day 1932

As the campaign began, the bulk of the Democratic Party remained in the grip of conservative orthodoxy that insisted the government had no role in helping the less fortunate or putting people to work. But soon, Roosevelt’s speeches began striking more liberal notes, quietly undergirded by a moral imperative. By the time of his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he was ready to offer “a new deal for America.”

When FDR was later asked for the roots of his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat.” There’s no question that the new social contract he struck was connected at a deep, instinctive level to the moral and social values articulated by Leo XIII.

Now the magnanimous spirit of the New Deal is under attack as never before. But help is on the way, courtesy of a South Side guy who may end up serving as the conscience of his country and the world.