I don’t know if you’ve heard already, but there’s a new pope in town.

Not only is he American — the first U.S.-born head of the Catholic Church — but he’s also from Chicago, which is close enough to where I live to have sent a thrill of victory through me when I heard the announcement.

For Greek people, it’s like hearing someone famous is Greek. Did you know Jennifer Aniston is half-Greek?

She’s one of us.

In the aftermath of the news about the papal election, there were plenty of funny pictures and videos generated about Pope Leo XIV’s Chicago roots. There was one of him emerging on the Vatican balcony in his papal vestments to The Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius,” also known as the intro music for the Chicago Bulls. Another picture showed him dressed as Mike Ditka. The Chicago Sun-Times headline for the story was “Da Pope.” A famous Chicago hot dog stand wrote “He’s eaten our dogs” on their billboard in Latin.

Great fun was had.

A lot of media people bothered the pope’s brother, who was forced to tell every reporter from the local newspapers on up to The New York Times which Chicago baseball team the pope liked as a lad. It’s the White Sox, as it turns out, although one of his parents was a St. Louis Cardinals fan, so at least Cubs fans narrowly escaped having that to deal with.

You’d be forgiven, consuming the media coverage around these parts, for thinking Pope Leo was a real hometown boy, though it seems to me he spent a heck of a lot more time in Peru, South America, than in Peru, Illinois. He was an actual missionary, the kind of “put your money where your mouth is” Catholic that even I, a non-Catholic, can respect.

So it’s interesting to see the reaction among American conservatives to his election to the papacy.

Just a few months ago, Pope Leo, then known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, tweeted out an article critical of Vice President JD Vance’s statements about how Christians are instructed to care for those who are close to them above all, then spread the care outward. In introducing the article, Prevost said this: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Leo XIV was an Augustinian friar and is the first Augustinian pope, according to his official Vatican biography, which also said that he “defended his doctoral thesis on ‘The Role of the Local Prior in the Order of Saint Augustine'” in 1987.

“His episcopal motto is ‘In Illo uno unum’ — words pronounced by Saint Augustine in a sermon on Psalm 127 to explain that ‘although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one,'” the biography reads.

Now, I’m no scholar, but it sounds like he knows quite a bit to me.