I'll go there proud

For a guy who spent most of his life in Pennsylvania, Jim Croce is embedded in our memory as representing Chicago. That’s because of his 1973 hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, who—as we all know, came from the Southside, “the baddest part of town”. (1973, the year he turned 30, was also when he died, in a small aircraft crash. What an appalling loss to the American music scene that was.)

As far as I know, “Leroy” is the only song Croce wrote set in Chicago, but it certainly made an impression. I thought about it when the College of Cardinals elected a Chicagoan named Robert Prevost to the papacy last week.

There’s something about people from the Second City—you know, that little bit of chip on their shoulder that makes them just a squidge bolshie. Croce captured that to the nth in “Leroy” (although, it didn’t play out according to plan, as Leroy Brown learned a lesson ‘bout messin’…), and I wondered about Father Bob. Haven’t seen any of that so far, but it’s only been a week, so early innings yet.

Prevost took the nom de Pontiff Leo XIV, which is also very interesting. The last Leo—in the Nineteenth Century, issued a notable encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in which he set forth the rights of workers to fair wages, safe working conditions and the formation of labor unions. (It also upheld property rights and free enterprise.) Leo XIII also spoke out for social justice and the rights of migrants as a subset of the innate dignity of humans.

I suspect that picking his professional name from the ranks of Leos is indicative of XIV’s intention, and I look forward to watching him take up where XIII left off. There may be some flavor of Chicago in how he manages the Byzantine operations of the Church at large and the Vatican in particular.

(It’s also notable that even the MAGA yahoos who are rendered apoplectic at the notion of referring to another human by the name that person prefers do not dead-name the Pope; they’re all able to manage “Leo” when they tweet about him being a “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.)

So the Jim Croce song I’m giving you today is “I’ve Got a Name”. It’s a simple concept that everyone can get behind. Here he is on Midnight Special singing it, not long before his death.

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