June 24, 2025 // National

A Windy City Celebration

OSV NEWS

Pope tells Crowd in Chicago, ‘God Can Work in Our Lives’

BySimone Orendain

CHICAGO (OSV News) – Under a bright sun, around an altar set up at centerfield, more than a dozen priests and bishops, led by Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, concelebrated a special Mass for the election of the first Chicago-born pope. Trinity Sunday’s vigil Mass on June 14 was celebrated at Rate Field, the home park of the Chicago White Sox, Pope Leo XIV’s favorite baseball team.

Concelebrants included the Archdiocese of Chicago’s auxiliary bishops as well as bishops from surrounding dioceses, several Augustinian priests, and other clergy. The liturgy included multilingual readings and prayers of the faithful, with the psalm sung in Spanish and English.

The Mass was preceded by a video message from Pope Leo XIV addressed mainly to young people, instructing them to look deep within their hearts and recognize that God is calling them to a relationship with His son Jesus Christ and to be the “light of hope to the world.”

In the video, the pope referred to one of St. Augustine’s famous phrases, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God,’” and, he added, “that restlessness is not a bad thing.”

“We shouldn’t look for ways to put out the fire, to eliminate or even numb ourselves to the tensions that we feel, the difficulties that we experience. We should rather get in touch with our own hearts and recognize that God can work in our lives, through our lives, and through us, reach out to other people,” Pope Leo said.

The pope stressed that God’s love is a source of hope and strength, which is a message young people can proliferate, he said.

From the ambo during the Mass, Cardinal Cupich looked around the stadium nearly filled with tens of thousands of people.

“Wow. I think I will remember this moment as ‘the sermon on the mound,’” he said in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount recounted in Matthew 5-7.

Cardinal Cupich then preached a homily on people’s inherent dignity, inviting the faithful to “live authentically.”

The cardinal reminded those present and watching via livestream that their worth comes from the fact that they are loved by God, that they are called to a life of self-giving service, and that life is to be lived not in isolation but through an interconnectedness with others, mirroring the relationship between the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

In emphasizing people’s interconnection, he said, “Humanity is greatly diminished whenever the unborn or the undocumented, the unemployed, the unhealthy, are excluded, uninvited, and unwelcome, or whenever we tell ourselves that they are of no concern to us.” The comment received widespread applause.

Among the attendees was Matthew Agoncillo, a student at the University of Illinois in Chicago who volunteered with its Newman Center during the distribution of the Eucharist at the Mass. He said he felt challenged by Pope Leo’s message.

“I think it’s sometimes hard to conceptualize what that means,” Agoncillo, 20, told OSV News. “For me, being a light is just spreading the faith through an abundance of love through yourself and spreading that to other people, which will hopefully send more light to other people, and the whole world can be on fire with a bunch of joy.”

The June 14 celebration hosted by the Chicago White Sox was organized by the Archdiocese of Chicago.  Chicago Catholic, the archdiocese’s news outlet, reported that, days after the conclave, Cardinal Cupich was dining with donors who happened to know the owner of the White Sox, Jerry Reinsdorf, when the cardinal’s staff brought up the idea for a celebration and Mass. The donors reportedly talked to Reinsdorf, which set plans for the event in motion.

Jennifer Esposito of Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago, said she was happy to attend the June 14 event in honor of Chicago’s native son.

“It’s still settling in that we have an American pope, let alone a pope from Chicago who sat in this stadium,” she told OSV News. “I mean, it’s just crazy, but I’m so glad I (attended). That was one of the most beautiful experiences, just to have all these people together and just the way they celebrated all the different cultures, I thought was fantastic. And I loved (the pope’s) message. I hope it resonates with young people, and I hope he’s going to be a good beacon for our Church.”