Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois, a suburb just south of the city of Chicago. Is this a story not just of the first American pope but a pope who grew up in the changing American suburbs? Over the years, what happened in his suburban community that had its first white settlers in the 1830s? First from the Encyclopedia of Chicago:

The mixture of railroads and the Little Calumet River proved to be a good site for industry. Dolton grew as a center for truck farming and manufacturing. It has produced bakery equipment, brass castings, shipping containers, cement, furniture, agricultural equipment, steel tanks, and chemicals. This diverse activity attracted an ethnically varied workforce. In the 1960s the Calumet Expressway (now the Bishop Ford Freeway) improved automobile and truck access to Chicago by two interchanges serving Dolton. In recent years large numbers of African Americans have moved to Dolton. The 2000 census reported a population of 25,614 with 14 percent white, 82 percent black, and 3 percent Hispanic.

According to a table on this page, Dolton was 99.9% white in 1960, 58.1% white in 1990, and 14.3% white in 2000. According to the Census Bureau, Dolton is now 4.9% white.

Second, WBEZ in 2018 reported on the change that had taken place in Dolton:

This is the story of how one small town became trapped in a downward spiral that poverty experts say follows a well-worn pattern of deindustrialization that leads to a disenfranchised economic class. Communities of color inherit a legacy of decline and then lack the resources, both financial and political, needed to turn things around.

The focus is Dolton, but it just as easily could be Riverdale, Harvey, Dixmoor, Posen, Calumet City or other nearby suburbs that once were powered by steel and other industry but over time slowly coalesced into a broad swath of economic distress. In other parts of Illinois, such as North Chicago to the north or Maywood to the west, the details change but the problems are often much the same.

It was no one single thing, but a cascade of events that changed the fortunes of Dolton and its neighbors. The decline of manufacturing led to a loss of job and pay opportunities, which in turn fed a wave of white flight as longtime residents left and were replaced by African-American city dwellers lured by better, yet not too expensive, housing.

But luring new investment to now majority black communities proved a challenge and housing values began to fall, taking down with them the tax revenues needed to keep up public services. Next came widespread foreclosures and an invasion of real estate scavengers who bought houses on the cheap, transforming a community of homeowners with a deep financial stake in their town into one of renters with looser bonds.

All the while, the political fabric vital to turning things around continued to fray. Government stumbled amid patronage and gridlock, rendering even more challenging the task of drawing needed new investment.

This sounds like a number of American suburbs that provided opportunities for white residents after World War Two but did not provide the same opportunities for later residents.

After World War Two, Prevost’s parents owned a small suburban home and were educators with master’s degrees:

His parents had been living in a 1,200-square-foot brick house on East 141st Place in Dolton. They bought it new in 1949, paying a $42 monthly mortgage.

His father Louis Prevost was superintendent of the south suburban schools in District 169. News clippings from 1945 show he served as a Navy lieutenant in the Mediterranean in WWII. He had graduated from the old Central Y.M.C.A. College in 1943 while living in Hyde Park.

The new pope’s mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, studied library science at DePaul University. Her death notice, in 1990, said she and her husband started the St. Mary’s library in the basement of the old school building and mentions jobs she had in the libraries at Holy Name Cathedral, Von Steuben High School on the North Side and at Mendel from 1969 to 1975.

This home was apparently recently fixed up after being purchased for under $70,000 in 2024.

The Prevosts attended a Catholic parish – St. Mary of the Assumption – just inside the southern borders of Chicago and next to the suburbs of Dolton and Riverdale. Here is what the property looked like as of July 2024:

This parish closed in 2011 and is part of a larger set of Catholic institutions the Prevost family was involved with and that have closed:

Like St. Mary’s, other Catholic institutions that helped shape the future cardinal are long gone, closed over the past several decades as the Catholic population around where he grew up and elsewhere plummeted. Among those bygone institutions:

• Mendel College Prep High School, where Prevost and his mother worked.

• St. Augustine Seminary High School in Michigan.

• Tolentine College in Olympia Fields, the suburb where he briefly lived.

• Mount Carmel Elementary School in Chicago Heights, where his father was principal.

Several of these communities mentioned – Olympia Fields, Chicago Heights – experienced racial change similar to that of Dolton.

If white Catholic residents indeed left Dolton and other communities on the South Side of Chicago and its southern suburbs and American suburbia became more complex, where did they move to? How did this shape the ministry of Pope Leo XIV?