“The Pope’s Church” / St. Mary’s / St. Mary of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church, Chicago
St. Mary's in Riverdale is really a parish landscape, with sanctuary, school, rectory, and Pope Leo XIV's childhood connection bound together on...
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St. Mary’s in Riverdale enters a new preservation phase after papal attention
The 2026 Chicago 7 listing turned St. Mary's in Riverdale from a closed parish complex into an active preservation question, with Pope Leo XIV's childhood connection raising the stakes for a campus already deteriorating behind damaged roofs and broken windows.
March 4, 2026
“The Pope’s Church” / St. Mary’s / St. Mary of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church, Chicago
Updated 2026
St. Mary's is no longer just a long-vacant Catholic campus on the Far South Side. After Pope Leo XIV's election and the 2026 endangered listing, the church and school now sit at the center of a much larger debate about reinvestment, landmarking and what Riverdale gets to keep.
St. Mary's had already spent years in a familiar preservation limbo: closed, visibly deteriorating and historically important but easy for the broader city to overlook. What changed in 2025 and 2026 was the scale of public attention. Once Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, the Riverdale church and school where he spent part of his childhood took on a significance that reached far beyond the Far South Side.
The campus moved into a different category once physical decline became impossible to treat as background. Preservation Chicago's 2026 Chicago 7 listing makes the point plainly: this is no longer only a story about memory or symbolism. It is a question of whether a damaged, vacant campus can be stabilized quickly enough to become a real civic asset rather than a lost landmark.
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St. Mary's now carries neighborhood history, papal history and a very immediate repair problem at the same time.
What Changed
Preservation Chicago added St. Mary's to its 2026 Chicago 7 Most Endangered list and tied the case directly to Pope Leo XIV's childhood connection to the parish and school.
That recognition followed the organization's earlier request for Chicago Landmark designation in 2025, which was intended to protect the church from demolition and strengthen the case for restoration.
Why This Update Matters
The church and school now carry two kinds of value at once: neighborhood value in a disinvested part of Chicago and international visibility because of the first American pope's connection to the site.
That combination changes the preservation math. A campus that might once have been treated as another closed parish property now has the potential to function as a pilgrimage site, a South Side restoration project and a test of whether Chicago can convert sudden attention into durable reinvestment.
What To Watch Next
The immediate indicators are whether landmark protection advances, whether emergency stabilization work begins and whether a credible reuse or stewardship partner emerges.
Any formal city action, ownership change, funding commitment or roof-and-window stabilization campaign would mark the difference between symbolic interest and an actual preservation path.