One astonishing thing we can say about Pope Leo XIV is that he is the first pope from the American Midwest.
This is a very good thing. The Midwest is getting a lot of attention from the Holy Spirit right now.
But what difference does it make if the Pope is from the Midwest?
When family members from the East Coast visit me in Kansas, they are surprised by how people treat them with genuine kindness.
If you don’t believe me, read author Colin Woodard. In American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures, he investigated the character of each region in the United States after the tragic way the American Indians were expelled.
He describes how the “Midlands” earned the name “America’s Heartland”:
“The Midlanders — a great many of them German speaking — carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered progress, practical politics, and a distrust of big government.”
If he’s right, and we carry the character of our region’s founders, we are hard-working and risk-taking people like the Ingalls family, committed patriotic centrists like President Eisenhower, and dedicated to family like — well, like the Prevost family.
Pope Leo XIV grew up in a typical Midwest family in Chicago.
In an article written before he was pope, the Chicago Sun-Times describes the family of the future Cardinal Robert Prevost who would become Pope Leo XIV.
A former parishioner of St. Mary of the Assumption, south of Chicago, remembers his mother Mildred — “Millie” — as “one of those ladies who keeps a Catholic parish running, a constant presence at the school. She was in the Altar and Rosary Society, at one point its president. With a memorable voice, she sang in the church’s choirs.”
Another parishioner, Betty Lyons-Geary, 94, said Leo’s father, Louis “Lou” Prevost was “just very staunch. … He was always there for Millie. But he stayed in the background because she was always doing things at the parish.”
Very much a Midwest Catholic dad.
But Pope Leo XIV is just the latest and greatest work of the Holy Spirit to come from the Midwest.
Midwestern states have long held the lead for the highest per-capita Mass attendance in the United States, and in the number of Eucharistic Adoration chapels per capita too.
So it is natural that the Eucharistic Revival was headed by a Midwestern bishop, Bishop Andrew Cozzens, a graduate of a Midwestern school, Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. He led the Eucharistic Revival whose crowning achievement was the Eucharistic Congress held in the Midwest — Indianapolis.
Then there is the Midwestern apostolate Word on Fire, headed by a bishop from Chicago, Bishop Robert Barron, who has been singularly influential in the Church, and is personally responsible for a book publishing house, a magazine, theological journal, an acclaimed documentary shown widely on PBS, an online movement of followers, a new congregation of priests, and millions of followers on YouTube and elsewhere.
Then there is Father Mike Schmitz, a Minnesota campus minister who is a wildly popular speaker at youth events, has attracted millions of views on YouTube and scored the nation’s #1 podcast with his Bible in a Year and its follow-up, Catechism in a Year.
Thanks to these Midwesterners, the faith is undergoing a revival in popular devotion and the Catholic intellectual tradition, and with young people.
Put all three of them together and you get the Midwestern Catholic higher education revival.
It is astonishing how many of the fastest growing Catholic colleges and programs are Midwestern phenomena.
In Ohio, there is Walsh University and Franciscan University of Steubenville. There is the University of St. Thomas Center for Catholic Studies in Minnesota, the University of Mary in North Dakota, and St. Augustine Institute in Missouri.
Of course, Benedictine College is in Kansas — the site of a proposed new pro-life Catholic medical school and the birthplace of Focus, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. Another college-student apostolate, St. Paul’s Outreach, is headquartered in Minnesota.
Kansas was the site of the Integrated Humanities Program that produced Catholic leaders such as Lincoln, Neb., Bishop James Conley; Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley; Clear Creek (Okla.) Abbot Dom Phillip Anderson; and Wyoming Catholic College founder Robert Carlson.
Now, with a Midwesterner sitting on the Chair of Peter, this positive evangelical energy can only grow.
Midwestern saints, pray for the Church and its Midwestern pope.
Blessed Stanley Rother, first U.S. born martyr, pray for us.
Father Juan Padlla, first martyr in what is now the United States, pray for us.
Venerable Emil Kapaun, peaceful hero of the battlefield, pray for us.
Pray that, with Leo leading us, the Midwest will continue to boldly proclaim the Gospel.
