WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the “situationship” she’d had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago.
We’d already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We’d heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we’d seen Portillo’s, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — “”a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers.”
Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer,” says one. Retorts the other: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl’s cash.”
Popes: They’re just like us?
Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn’t know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: “deep-dish communion wafers?”), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating.
Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans’ peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself.
American ‘regular guy-ism’ began with the nation itself
When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown’s taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty.
In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of “effete” royalty from back east — whether “back east” was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson’s form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the “regular guy” in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American “rest of us.”
“Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,” says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “We want these figures to look up to but also to sit down with.”
And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today.
Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of “boxers or briefs.” George Bush, now a nondrinker, became “a guy you’d want to have a beer with.” (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: “I want my president to be the designated driver.”)
This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was “American Pie” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on “popular.” The message: This is not a “back east” pope.
“Popes have always been alien — strangers,” says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. “We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.”
He places Leo’s ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism.
But as for the “he’s one of us” approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. “He has done none of this himself,” Baick says. “The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.”
This guy is far more than the pope next door
And yet …
Americans famously adored Princess Diana, “the people’s princess.” People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as “American royalty.” And even though we’re a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time.
The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities.
“This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,” says Danielle Lindemann, author of “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.”
“We’re kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that’s a salient and dominant narrative,” says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We’re getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.”
Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing “Feliz Navidad” into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there’s that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls.
So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago.
“Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,” Gibson says.
“The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,” he says. “If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?”
___
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
