(LifeSiteNews) – Pope Leo XIV, the first Successor of Peter to be born in the USA, addressed his birth city of Chicago over a video link this afternoon.
The pontiff, born Robert Francis Prevost, made his first speech as Pope to fellow Americans through a prerecorded video message, at Rate Field, the home of his favorite baseball team, the Chicago White Sox. The message was his contribution to a day set aside in the Windy City to celebrate its native son’s election as Pope.
“This is the feast of the Most Holy Trinity,” Leo observed. “And I begin with that because the Trinity is a model of God’s love for us: God, Father, Son and Spirit. Three persons in one God live united in the depth of love, in community, sharing that communion with all of us.”
The pontiff expressed his gratitude to the Chicagoans celebrating his election and encouraged them to “continue to build up community [and] friendship as brothers and sisters in your daily lives, in your families, in your parishes, in the Archdiocese, and throughout our world.”
Leo had a “special word of greeting” to young people in the baseball stadium and watching online. He encouraged them to look for God both in their hearts and among those close to them:
It may be that the context of your life has not given you the opportunity to live the faith, to live as participants in the faith community. And I’d like to take this opportunity to invite each one of you to look into your own hearts, to recognize that God is present and that perhaps in many different ways, God is reaching out to you, calling you, inviting you to know His Son Jesus Christ through the Scriptures, perhaps through a friend or relative, a grandparent who might be a person of faith. … Discover how important it is for each one of us to pay attention, [to] the presence of God in our own hearts, to that longing for love in our lives, for … true searching, for finding the ways that we may be able to do something with our own lives to serve others. And in that service to others, we may find that coming together in friendship, building up community, we too can find true meaning in our lives.
Leo also talked about hope, saying that the love of God “can be the source of hope that we all need in our lives.” Speaking again to young people, he said that they themselves are “a promise of hope” for the world:
The world looks to you, as you look around yourselves, and says, “We need you. We want you to come together to share with us in this common mission as Church and in the society of announcing a message of true hope, of promoting peace, promoting harmony among all peoples. We have to look beyond our own, if you will, egotistical ways. We have to look for ways of coming together and promoting a message of hope.” St. Augustine says to us that if we want the world to be a better place, we have to begin with ourselves. We have to begin with our own lives, our own hearts.
The Pope also encouraged his hearers not to fear their restlessness and questioning, citing St. Augustine’s famous observation of the human condition:
We all live with many questions in our hearts. St. Augustine speaks so often of our restless hearts and says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God.” That restlessness is not a bad thing, and we shouldn’t look for ways to put out the fire, to eliminate or even numb ourselves to the tensions that we feel, the difficulties that we experience. We should rather get in touch with our own hearts and recognize that God can work in our lives, through our lives, and through us, reach out to other people.
He ended his reflections with an invitation to his audience to open their hearts to God:
I would like to invite all of you to take a moment to open up your own hearts to God, to God’s love, to that peace which only the Lord can give us, to feel how deeply, beautiful, how strong, how meaningful the love of God is in our lives, and to recognize that while we do nothing to earn God’s love, God in his own generosity continues to pour out his love upon us. And as he gives us his love, he only asks us to be generous and to share what he has given us with others.
The festivities included interviews with two of Pope Leo’s friends, the debut of a song (“One of Us” by Augustinian Brother David Marshall) about the new pontiff, and a Mass; over 30,000 people are believed to have taken part. According to CBS News, tickets cost only $5 and sold out the day they became available. The event, called “Chicago Celebrates Pope Leo XIV,” was organized by the Archdiocese of Chicago with the assistance of the White Sox organization.
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Chicago’s Bishop Larry Sullivan told CBS that the event was “a historic event in the history of our city.”
“It’s a day of tremendous excitement, and I’m so happy that so many people want to be a part of this great day,” he added.
The Mass, which followed the Pope’s message, was celebrated by the Archbishop of Chicago, Blaise Cupich. At the beginning of the event, Cupich had said that ecumenism and interfaith dialogue were a priority for Pope Leo XIV, as they were for him. Via the live broadcast, the vice-president of the White Sox had invited the Pope to come back to Rate Field, and throw a ceremonial pitch.
Father John “Father Merk” Merkelis, a friend of the pontiff, revealed that the night before the Conclave, Pope Leo told him that he was going to sleep well, for the cardinals were not going to elect an American.
Leo XIV was born in Mercy Hospital at its then-location at Calumet Avenue and 26th Street in Chicago’s South Side. This is the part of the Windy City most associated with the Chicago White Sox. (The Chicago Cubs baseball team, whose home is Wrigley Field, traditionally belongs to the North Side.) Leo XIV’s affinity for the team is much appreciated by the White Sox, whose baseball cap he was photographed wearing earlier this week. He was also captured on video attending a White Sox game in 2005.
As Robert Prevost, the pontiff became a citizen of Peru, where he first arrived as a missionary in 1985.
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