With a smile across his face, new Bears coach Ben Johnson said he’s heard over the past 24 hours that the Pope Leo XIV might be a Bears fan.
“I’ve heard rumblings,” he said after Friday’s rookie minicamp, his first as Bears head coach. “But that hasn’t been discussed too much firsthand.”
Robert Francis Prevost, the Cardinal who became Pope on Thursday, was born in Dolton and is an avowed White Sox fan. In 2005, he and friend Ed Schmit attended a Sox World Series game at the future Rate Field, where Prevost was captured wearing a pinstriped jersey and checking his phone.
The Cubs claimed Thursday on the Wrigley Field marquee that the new pope was a fan of theirs, only for his family to set the record straight: His mother was a Cubs fan, but he was raised a Sox supporter.
The Bears’ ownership group might be a fan of Pope Leo. Matriarch Virginia McCaskey, who died in February at 102, raised her children as devout Catholics.
