Faith, pope, and love of White Sox baseball

Why do we believe in things?

Augustine of Hippo was not, as far as we know, a baseball fan. He was born in the 4th Century, in present-day Algeria, a bit too early to enjoy our favorite sport. What he was a fan of, though, was life. His early years were marked by wealth, a life spent in the pursuit of worldly goods and pleasures. His most famous quote is marked by the contradictions of faith, the pull of something deeper while being unable to reject the happiness of the material world.

“Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

It’s all right there, isn’t it? Wanting to be “good,” wanting to be devout, wanting to eventually do what he thought was the right thing … but, ah, the world. Spices and conversation and wine and laughter. Not yet, Lord. Not yet.

(Incidentally, I think this was better phrased by Gillian Welch in “Look at Miss Ohio.” Lord I wanna do right, but not right now.)

Augustine did settle down, though, and become one of the great minds of the early Church. He founded an order, which we know as Augustinians, devoted to the idea that humility and poverty could make the world more peaceful. They believed that everyone was under the umbrella of God’s love.

That order persists today. And today, one of their own became the Pope. Robert Prevost, an Augustinian, came out of the conclave regaled with the pomp of the papacy. But Leo the XIV, as he’ll forever be known, started in Chicago.

More specifically, he started as White Sox fan.

There’s been some controversy about that today. The most Chicago thing ever was initial online celebration that the first American pope is one of our guys, followed by immediate speculation as to which kind of guy he actually is. A report by ABC 7 said he was a Cubs fan, which sent premature white spoutings from metaphorical Wrigleyville chimneys.

But as the day went on, his brother John (you know, the Pope’s brother — John, from Dalton!) said that Robert (you know, Bob, the Pope!) had always been a Sox fan.

We don’t know, as of this writing, if baseball fandom has persisted in a career spent serving in parishes here and in South America. We know he was a teacher at St. Rita’s in the 80s which is super cool. Every southsider I know was texting aunts to see if they ever got detention from the Pope. But so far I haven’t seen if he is still interested in the game, or if, like Augustine, hasn’t touched a scorecard in years.

But let’s say that he is. Let’s say the Pope is a White Sox fan. What does that mean?

Obviously, very little. There won’t be a divine intervention on Jerry’s heart. The ball isn’t going to be blown fair by a fiery pentecostal wind. Other than some weird and meaningless bragging rights, it doesn’t mean anything at all.

And of course, if you are not a Catholic, it is mere celebrity. If you are one of the people who is disgusted by the misogynistic depredations of the institution, especially regarding their decades-long allowance and cover-up of child rape, even a goofy celebration seems grotesque.

I, myself, belong in that paragraph. I was raised Catholic, and actually had a period where I was devout — and not as a child, but in my late teens. I was fascinated by the mystery of faith and the antiquity of the Church. While I struggled with some of the teachings, I deeply wanted to believe, and, like Augustine, tried.

Tried, until it became too much. The evil couldn’t outweigh the good. The earthly horrors made the celestial promises seem tacky, fake, impossible. I not only left the Church, but was wrenched from faith by the evil of men. The Church presented itself as the one true faith, your only real ticket to salvation, no exceptions, so when I left the church, I left my faith at the door.

I’m far from alone in this. As was mentioned in our SSS staff discussions, probably like 80% of white White Sox fans are lapsed Catholics to some degree or the other: They might be Christmas-and-Easter Catholics, or, like my late mother, have found community there even if they didn’t care for the hierarchy and rituals. Or like me, they might despise the Church.

But there’s a pull, man: that’s what Catholicism does. It pulls. It’s in your blood, if you are a cradle Catholic. I couldn’t help but be excited today. I couldn’t help but identify. It’s part of me, even if my path was the exact opposite of Augustine’s.

In a way, it’s like being a Sox fan. It’s part of your identity. There are people who have let it go, in these gross wilderness years, and I appreciate their ability to do so. But I can’t and don’t want to. It is community, it is family, it is also in my blood. I don’t try to reject it, but even if I wanted to, it would be impossible.

So maybe Leo is still a Sox fan. Maybe he still thinks about it. Maybe it is even what pushed him toward Augustinians. After all, humility and poverty are part of being a Sox fan; ownership gives us the former while crying about the latter. Maybe being a fan of the second team in the second city made him join an order that cares for the downtrodden, that thinks the refugee, the mendicant, the prisoner, the leper, the battered and bruised, deserve love and fall under the loving hand of God’s care. Maybe faith in that kept him a fan of this franchise the same way something deep and inchoate keeps us rooting for it.

Faith is a weird thing. Being a fan of a team is a kind of reckless faith. You have to hope things will get better, things completely out of your control. It doesn’t make any sense at all. And in a way, that sort of abandonment of reason is part of the joy: You are letting yourself be subsumed by hope.

That kind of hope is needed to sustain a faith, and when it is gone, it is gone. Maybe you want the Church to change and reconcile its deeds with its words. Maybe you want it to crumble to dust. Maybe you don’t care about any of this, and just think it is cool that the Pope is a White Sox fan and might know who Ron Karkovice is. That’s a kind of faith, too: The idea that this thing we care about matters, and that there are people, from the guy at the brat stand to the guy in the robes who has taken on the spiritual burdens of a billion people, share something impossible to name. This stuff matters. It’s part of what makes us human.

Maybe you hope — or pray, in whatever spiritual or secular way you use that word — that things will change, both in the world and for the Sox. After all, we want to be granted not chastity and continence, but joy and happiness — and soon.