Like millions around the world, I watched white smoke billow from the Sistine Chapel on May 8 with a mix of bemusement and morbid fascination. (I’d watched the movie Conclave a couple of weeks earlier, so my interest in all things papal was piqued.) Back in the day, the smoke signal was a genius way to quickly communicate that a conclave had chosen a new pope — the original tweet. In the age of X and Instagram, which the new pope could access from his ever-present Apple Watch, the pomp seemed silly. A televised smoke signal? Why not skip the middleman?

My eye-rolling stopped when I heard the new pope’s hometown. Chicago? Really? Despite being a Catholic so lapsed I can lap the other lapses without breaking a sweat, I found myself giggling like a schoolboy and shaking my head, not in cynicism but wonder, maybe even pride, as I heard about Robert “Call Me Leo” Prevost.

Newscasters quickly dug into Pope Leo’s Chicago roots: born in the city, raised in south suburban Dolton, altar boy at St. Mary of the Assumption on the Far South Side, student at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park. NBC-5’s Mary Ann Ahern, reporting from Rome, was the first Chicagoan I heard claim a personal connection: She’d nabbed a quick interview with the future pontiff after his predecessor’s conclave 12 years earlier. 

I didn’t know then that Ahern was kicking off an intense game of Six Degrees of Pope Leo. Every week I heard new connections. My buddy Jon was an altar boy for Father Flach at St. Bede’s while he lived in the same house as Father Prevost! Probably. Another friend’s sister knows three people who knew Prevost when he lived here — three! Another friend was at Von Steuben High School, where Leo’s mom was a librarian! Does he remember her? Well, no, they didn’t overlap, but still!

Why were Chicagoans of all stripes, Catholic and non, so eager to claim a connection? One reason, of course, is clout. No city has a better grasp of influence and connections, the potential long-term advantage of knowing a guy who knows a guy. We perfected earthly clout and now hope we have the heavenly version on our side. Who knows what the Big Guy might turn a blind eye to after a word from our homeboy?

The purely associative thrill is another obvious factor. A connection to someone important, however tenuous, makes us feel important. This partly explains the flurry of memes making the rounds: “Chicago-Style Pope,” featuring Leo as a hot dog; Leo clutching an Italian beef and bottle of Malört; and, my favorite, the SNL Superfans in Bears regalia and miters, captioned “Da Prayers.”

Another motive for the memes and source of their humor, though, is the incongruity of it all. Rome, Holy See, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, and … Bob from Chicago? We’re a city of steel, not gold; crust, not crimson; Jewels, not jewels. Like another South Sider who defied the odds to reach the greatest heights of power, Father Bob was an unlikely candidate, the underdog, and we’re all about the underdog. The Second City loves the little guy who punches above his weight.

I’ve heard many locals say, “He’s one of us.” By this, we mean a Chicagoan, sure, but also an ordinary guy from a working-class neighborhood, with grandparents who emigrated from Europe on his dad’s side and roots in Black Creole Louisiana and the Caribbean on his mom’s. What could be more Chicago? Pope Leo, the son of a schoolteacher and a librarian, gets it, we think. He understands poverty and racism, the strength of diversity, the pain of migration, and the dignity due all work.

Of course a pope from the City of Big Shoulders, the home of the Haymarket Affair and the Pullman Strike, named himself “Leo.” No city has fought harder for workers’ rights, and Father Bob’s eponym, Leo XIII, was called “the Pope of the Workers” because he championed living wages, safe workplaces, and the right to organize during the Second Industrial Revolution.

As we teeter on the edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the prospect of artificial intelligence gobbling jobs like a generous alderman, we’re comforted by Leo’s early rejection of an AI pope that would have — this is for real — granted virtual papal audiences. “If there’s anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the pope is high on the list,” he told biographer Elise Allen.

The infamous hot dog joint on Clark Street, the Wiener’s Circle, had one of the best claims of a Leo connection posted on its sign shortly after that white smoke appeared: Canes nostros ipse comedit, Latin for “He has eaten our dogs.”

Has he?

On a literal level, I can’t say, but figuratively, yes, Father Bob has eaten our dogs. He has walked in our shoes. He has smelled the stench of our factories, lived in the shadows of our now-shuttered steel mills, seen the scourge of white flight, watched the corruption of our politicians, and — I can almost guarantee — honked for our picketers on strike. He is one of us, unifying Augustine’s City of God and the City on the Make, bedfellows less strange than they first seem. 

A dash of machine savvy will come in handy as Leo rules over the world’s largest church, a job that would challenge even Old Man Daley’s powers of organization and patronage. Chicagoans, Catholic or otherwise, will watch with pride, confident Leo is looking out for us and ready to dole out the holy clout we might one day need.

I can just see Peter greeting us at the pearly gates, removing a cigar in the manner of a wary ward committeeman to warn, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Slyly, we’ll look around, lean in, and whisper, “Leo.”