No one loves his hometown team like Pope Leo XIV, who has closely followed the Sox’s heavenly playoff run.
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For a few minutes in August, the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Sovereign of Vatican City and Servant of the Servants of God was just a 13-year-old boy named Bobby, holding up a baseball and gazing at it.
The 2026 White Sox had signed the ball for their most famous fan and sent it to him in Father Tom McCarthy’s carry-on luggage, along with a handful of jerseys, pennants, bobbleheads and Sox-themed miters (better known among laymen as pope hats). Now Pope Leo XIV, the clergyman born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, was pawing through the box and exclaiming every time he pulled out another piece of merchandise.
“He was,” McCarthy recalled last week, “like a kid on Christmas morning.”
As they opened the gifts, McCarthy recounted the recent Pope Night the White Sox had held at Rate Field: the pope hat giveaway, the sign of peace in the stands, the $14,000 check for the Midwest Augustinian Province in honor of the 14th Pope Leo. (“Why didn’t you take the name John?” McCarthy quipped. “You would’ve been the 24th. We would’ve gotten an extra $10,000!”)
It was a great night, McCarthy finished.
“Yeah,” the pope said. “Too bad we didn’t win.”
The Vatican did not respond to a message seeking details of how Leo has been following his White Sox in their quest for the American League pennant, but his friends and colleagues say he certainly keeps up on their progress.
It feels right that America’s pope should be a fan of America’s pastime. And somehow it feels even more right that he should root for the Chicago White Sox, a team that has perhaps required more divine intervention than any other in recent years.
The 2024 White Sox lost 121 games, the most in the 125 years of MLB’s modern era. They were eliminated from playoff contention on Aug. 17 that season and finished 41 games back — of fourth place.
Then they slashed payroll, to $74 million from $123 million. They went 10–28, a dismal .263 winning percentage, to start 2025.
But then here came the white smoke, and somehow, here came the White Sox. They went 50–74 (.403) the rest of the year, as the newly elected Leo donned a White Sox cap in St. Peter’s Square. The resurrection has continued this season: The White Sox finished 84–78, good for second in the American League Central, swept the Houston Astros in the wild-card series and have split their first four games of the AL Division Series with the Cleveland Guardians. The teams will play a decisive Game 5 on Saturday night in Cleveland as the White Sox look to advance to their first AL Championship Series since they won the World Series in 2005.
Aboard the papal flight to Paris from Rome earlier this month, Leo refused to confirm or deny divine intervention for the team’s improvement. He grinned mischievously and said, “No comment.” Then he commented anyway: “Great things happen in Chicago,” he said.
People close to the pope report that sports fit neatly into his belief system.
“As someone who’s kind of grounded in Augustinian roots, he really values community, and I think that that’s what sports does,” said Father Robert Hagan, who was mentored by Prevost when Hagan was a novice. “I think that’s what Chicago is experiencing with the White Sox — it brings people together.”
But they also report that he really just loves the White Sox. Leo is a classic Chicago sports fan: He yelled “Da Bears” from the popemobile, he has talked trash about the Cubs in at least two languages, and friends, said Sister Thérèse DelGenio in an interview, have noticed that he sometimes logs on to video calls in a Bears T-shirt.
“It humanizes him,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago. “I think that people really do find that endearing.”
Elise Ann Allen, the pope’s Rome-based biographer, said in an interview that the young Bobby learned to navigate a home life in which his mother, Mildred, was a die-hard Cubs fan and his father, Louis, cheered for the St. Louis Cardinals.
“He said you had to be accepting of others and maintain an open mind, because if not, you wouldn’t get dinner,” Allen said.
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Cupich tries to straddle a similar line, declining to choose between the Sox and the Cubs. “Living in Chicago, I have to be a Chicago fan,” he said. “It’s safer.”
This is something of a cop-out, he admitted. So does Leo get credit for picking a side?
Cupich laughed. No way, he said: “He doesn’t have to live here!”
Still, it was always the White Sox for young Bobby. He grew up in Dolton, Illinois, 15 miles south of Comiskey Park, when Luis Aparicio was starring on the South Side. On summer breaks from St. Augustine Seminary High School near Saugatuck, Michigan, and later from Villanova University, he would catch Sox games in the cheap seats with friends. He usually served as the designated driver.
When Prevost worked as a missionary in Peru in the 1990s, his then-roommate Father John Lydon recalled, their rabbit-ear televisions lacked access to American sports, so Prevost became a passionate fan of the local soccer team, Club Alianza Lima.
“It was the team of the people,” Lydon said, contrasting it with Club Universitario de Deportes, which was considered the squad of the elites. The priests watched games in their living room, and Prevost “got into it,” Lydon recalled, jumping up from the couch and yelling to celebrate goals.
Later, when Prevost was prior general of the Augustinians, NPR’s Scott Detrow reported, he took part in an exercise in which he had to paint symbols reflecting his identity. He drew an American flag, Chicago’s Sears Tower, the Augustinian emblem, a Christmas tree … and the White Sox logo.
He attended a handful of games every year with Ed Schmit, a friend from when both worked at a Chicago Catholic school, and when the White Sox made the 2005 World Series, Schmit called Prevost immediately. After Leo’s election, news outlets dug up photos of them together at Game 1, which made the pontiff chuckle — but not just for the reasons you might think.
“You know,” he has told people, “I was also at Game 2.”
He has made no promises about visiting a potential 2026 World Series game, but he is doing his part to help the White Sox get there: On the eve of the playoffs, team owner Jerry Reinsdorf was going through his mail when he noticed a large envelope, postmarked Vatican City.
“It is my hope that the White Sox will continue to foster bonds of friendship and solidarity among people, and thus bear hopeful witness to the possibility of living and working together in peace,” Leo wrote. “With these sentiments, I willingly invoke the Almighty’s abundant blessings upon you and your loved ones.”
“Imagine a Jewish kid from Brooklyn getting a letter from the pope,” Reinsdorf told reporters. “I’m going to convert.”
“By the way,” said Brooks Boyer, the White Sox’s head of marketing and a lifelong Catholic, “the Vatican has the coolest letterhead you could imagine.”
If the White Sox win the World Series, Boyer joked, maybe they will top the traditional White House visit with a trip to the Vatican. If they do, perhaps Leo will show them around the papal archives, where he stores many of the gifts he has received, including many of the contents of that care package.
But not all of them, said McCarthy. A few of those gifts went straight into the pope’s personal apartment, where Bobby can see them anytime he wants.
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Anthony Faiola in Rome contributed to this report.
