Chicago artist adds Pope Leo XIV to White Sox mural outside Rate Field
Rate Field will be packed on Saturday, but not to see the White Sox play ball. Instead the crowd will be watching a message from Pope XIV, as Chicago celebrates the new pontiff.
The Archdiocese of Chicago is putting on the event, featuring a mass and video message from the pope, but if you walk by the stadium before Saturday's gathering, you'll see Pope Leo already has made an appearance.
In the shadow of a viaduct next to the White Sox' ballpark, artist Cyd Smillie made a canvas out of concrete 400 feet wide and 12 feet tall.
"The Sox paid for it, and it's a baseball-themed mural on both sides," Smillie said.
She painted the mural nine years ago, but Smillie is always painting.
Her mural is based on a kid's big baseball dream of hitting a home run.
"The entire town and the mayor and the president and everybody turns out to say, 'You won. You were great,'" she said.
Down the line from the two Mayor Daleys and President Obama, there's a divine addition – Pope Leo XIV donning a White Sox cap.
Smillie had the design and started adding Pope Leo XIV to the mural before the pope – a lifelong White Sox fan – donned a White Sox cap earlier this week at the Vatican; an example of papal life imitating public art.
Chicago-based Loyola Press sponsored the work, and is publishing the first book about Pope Leo.
Smillie finished the mural just in time for a sold-out celebration of the pope at Rate Field on Saturday.
"It happened in a matter of days," she said.
On Saturday, Rate Field will host a mass for Pope Leo, and the pope will share a recorded video message.
"It's a pretty thrilling event to have an American pope, to have a Chicago pope, and then to be able to celebrate it all here," Smillie said.
Smillie never expected to paint the pope.
"Not in a million years," she said.
But any White Sox fan would agree she knocked it out of the park. She also painted a mobile version of her pope mural called the "Pop-up Pope."
Fans will be able to take pictures with the mural outside the stadium on Saturday.
And there's more big news for Pope Leo. He will canonize the Catholic Church's first saint from the millennial generation.
Carlo Acutis will receive the posthumous honor on Sept. 7. The British-born, Italian-raised Acutis died from leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15.
Church officials said, during his short life, Acutis spread awareness about the faith by creating a website that documented reports of miracles.
Acutis earned the nickname of "God's Influencer," and has been credited with the required two miracles for sainthood.
One of those was in 2020, when he reportedly healed a sick boy who had a defect that prevented him from eating normally.
