White Sox Fan Pope Leo Claps Back at Cubs Fan Over Rivalry

Pope Leo XIV delivered a holy heckle to one Chicago Cubs fan who decided to yell “Go Cubs!” to him during a parade in Vatican City.

“Han perdido! They lost!” replied Leo, a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan, in Spanish and English.

The Cubs fell to the San Diego Padres in the National League Wild Card Series to end their season earlier this month. The White Sox, for their part, lost more than 100 regular season games for the third straight year, finishing 60-102, 27 games out of the playoff picture.

The White Sox shared a video of the exchange via X, showing Leo, 70, atop the popemobile, waving to the crowd as the Cubs fan chastised him.

“That’s our Pope,” the caption read.

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Leo became the first American pope when he ascended to the papacy in May, following the death of Pope Francis at age 88. The Chicago native has been open about his sports fandom, particularly his allegiance to the South Siders.

The now-Pope notably attended Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, in which the White Sox defeated the Houston Astros on their way to their first championship in 88 years. The team, in turn, has embraced its most famous fan, unveiling a mural of him next to the section he sat in that night.

The mural shows a current depiction of the Pope, born Robert Prevost, with an image of him at that game in the upper right corner. The image is from the Fox broadcast in the 9th inning, which caught the future pontiff in a crowd reaction shot.

“He sat in row 19, seat 2,” Nick Schmit told The Athletic in May. (Schmit’s father, Eddie Schmit Jr., brought Leo to the game.) “My dad always sat in row 19, seat 1. He never gave that seat up to anybody. That was his seat. So when he took people, those people would sit next to him, usually.”

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Leo credited growing up in Chicago amid the Cubs-White Sox rivalry for preparing him to navigate global diplomacy.

“At home, I grew up a White Sox fan, but my mother was a Cubs fan, so you couldn’t be one of those fans that shut out the other side,” he told Vatican reporter Elise Ann Allen in an interview for his upcoming biography in September.

“We learned, even in sports, to have an open, dialogical, friendly and not angry competitive stance on things like that, because we might not have gotten dinner had we,” he added.

Leo was also spotted wearing a ‘47 branded White Sox cap at the Vatican in June. He said it was a gift from a couple who cheers for the Boston Red Sox. (He also publicly wore a ‘47 cap for his alma mater, Villanova University and is a fan of Wildcats basketball.)

“He’s the ultimate influencer,” Patrick Cassidy, Vice President of Marketing at ‘47, told The Athletic at the time. “What the Pope is wearing is the exact model that a style-conscious fan can get on ‘47brand.com. That’s pretty cool.”