The Catholic church electing its first American pope made it inevitable that we would be dissecting his sports fandom. There was some confusion when it came to Pope Leo XIV, however.
Leo, formerly known as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, became one of the world’s most famous Chicago natives on Thursday with his elevation to the papacy. Born in Chicago’s Mercy Hospital and raised in nearby Dolton, he is the first pope to hail from the U.S.
A Chicago native would naturally be expected to be a fan of the local teams, but that gets tricky when the city has two MLB clubs.
Given that he served as an altar boy at a church in the city’s south side, it was initially thought that he would be a fan of the Chicago White Sox, but then ABC News complicated things by reporting that he was actually the rare south-side Cubs fan.
Let’s just say the Cubs ran with that.
However, less than an hour later, Leo’s brother offered some conflicting information to Chicago’s WGN News (video above):
“He was never, ever a Cubs fan, so I don’t know where that came from. He was always a Sox fan. Our mother was a Cubs fan. I don’t know, maybe that clued in there, and our dad was a Cardinals fan, so I don’t know where that all came from. And all the aunts in our mom’s family were from north side, so that’s why they were Cubs fans.”
While a south-side Cubs fan would have been odd, a Cubs fan and a Cardinals fan raising a White Sox fan sounds like it will have its own backstory.
Like every pope before him, Pope Leo XIV is not a Cubs fan. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
So unless the pope’s own brother is very, very wrong, an MLB team just claimed the pope as its fan when he is in fact a supporter of their crosstown rival, which is a sentence we honestly didn’t see ourselves publishing when the day began.
But it’s no big deal. It’s not like the Cubs have ever had to worry about a curse or anything.
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