Archdiocese of Chicago and the White Sox organized the Mass and festivities in honor of the pope, a Chicago native
CHICAGO — Under a bright sun, around an altar set up at center field, more than a dozen priests and bishops led by Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich concelebrated a Mass for the election of the first-ever Chicago-born pope. Trinity Sunday’s vigil Mass June 14 was at Rate Field, the home park of the Chicago White Sox, Pope Leo XIV’s favorite baseball team.
Concelebrants included the Archdiocese of Chicago’s auxiliary bishops as well as bishops from surrounding dioceses, several Augustinian priests, the incoming president of Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union and other clergy. The liturgy included multilingual readings and prayers of the faithful, with the psalm sung in Spanish and English.
From the ambo, Cardinal Cupich looked around the stadium nearly filled with tens of thousands of people.
After the Mass in honor of Pope Leo XIV, faithful posed with cutouts of the pope stationed throughout the concession areas of Rate Field, the home park of the Chicago White Sox.
“Wow. I think I will remember this moment as ‘the sermon on the mound,’” he said in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount recounted in Matthew 5-7.
Pope Leo XIV, a dual citizen of the United States and Peru, spent nearly 20 years on mission in Peru, where he taught seminarians and practiced canon law, and later led the Diocese of Chiclayo along the country’s impoverished northwestern coast.
The Mass was preceded by a video message from Pope Leo XIV addressed mainly to young people, instructing them to look deep within their hearts and recognize that God is calling them to a relationship with His son Jesus Christ, and to be the “light of hope to the world.”
In the video, the pope referred to one of St. Augustine’s famous phrases, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God,” and, he added, “that restlessness is not a bad thing.”
“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,” Pope Leo said.
The pope stressed that God’s love is a source of hope and strength, which is a message young people can proliferate, he said.
Among the attendees was Matthew Agoncillo, a student at the University of Illinois in Chicago who volunteered with its Newman Center during the distribution of the Eucharist at the Mass. He said he felt challenged by Pope Leo’s message.
“I think it’s sometimes hard to conceptualize what that means,” Agoncillo said. “For me, being a light is just spreading the faith through an abundance of love through yourself and spreading that to other people, which will hopefully send more light to other people, and the whole world can be on fire with a bunch of joy. So I think it’s important to share your light with other people.”
Prior to the Mass, Pope Leo’s longtime friend and high school classmate, Augustinian Father John Merkelis, talked about the pope’s humble, “regular guy” character. His former professor at Catholic Theological Union, Sister Dianne Bergant, a member of the Sisters St. Agnes of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, said she kept all her records from 45 years of teaching and he was a good student.
In the homily, Cardinal Cupich preached on people’s inherent dignity, inviting the faithful to “live authentically” and taking a forceful stand against the country’s immigration policy.
In emphasizing people’s interconnection, he said, “Humanity is greatly diminished whenever the unborn or the undocumented, the unemployed, the unhealthy, are excluded, uninvited, and unwelcome or whenever we tell ourselves that they are of no concern to us.” The comment received widespread applause.
While acknowledging nations’ duties to secure their borders, protect the public “and enact reasonable rules for immigration,” Cardinal Cupich said, “it is wrong to scapegoat those who are here without documents. For indeed, they are here due to a broken immigration system,” he said to sustained applause.
“Both parties have failed to fix” that system, he admonished.
“(The undocumented) are here, not by invasion, but by invitation,” he said as the applause and cheers became louder.
