Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
CHICAGO — Long before Pope Leo XIV began publicly describing the American president’s worldview as a “delusion of omnipotence” while sitting on a throne made of solid gold in his church with Michelangelo’s original art on the ceiling, he was a seven-year-old from Dolton, Illinois sitting in the Grand Stand at a live broadcast of WGN-TV’s Bozo the Clown show.
Pope Leo XIV "clowning," if you will. ((Edgar Beltrán/Wikimedia))
His older brother John Prevost confirmed the appearance this week, calling it “a fun piece of family history.” Vatican observers have described it as the first documented instance of the future pontiff receiving direct exposure to a clown show, specifically one where adults in ill-fitting costumes walking funny in strange shoes insist on their own authority with the mental gravitas of a five-year old. No official statement has connected the two events, because we can all see it plain as day.
The tickets, according to his brother, were notoriously hard to get back in 1962. A member of the WGN band taught music at the elementary school where the future pope’s father served as superintendent, and the offer was extended informally. The Prevost brothers, John recalled, “jumped at the chance.” The family attended during a school holiday, which John noted with some pride, as it meant nothing academic was missed. He offered no comment on what was gained.
“Bozo’s Circus” aired on WGN-TV from 1961 to 2001, a forty-year run during which ticket waiting lists were sometimes measured in years. Families planned their future lives around the possibility of being able to attend. The show was, by any reasonable measure, a civic institution held together almost entirely by a man in face paint shouting about prize buckets.
Pope Leo has not publicly commented on the revelation. Those close to him note that he has spent recent months addressing a political environment in which a grown man wearing orange makeup routinely issues statements about crowd size, attendance records, how “tremendous” the tickets were, and who routinely occupies the world stage in a manner not entirely dissimilar to a televised children’s program starring an actual clown. Cardinal sources, speaking on background, have characterized the pontiff’s composure under these conditions as “remarkable” and “possibly pre-existing.” One described it as “a surprisingly relevant experience.”
The current American president has called Pope Leo “weak on crime,” “terrible for foreign policy,” and “very liberal,” and has posted AI-generated images of himself as a Jesus-like figure apparently resurrecting Jeffrey Epstein while a bald eagle flies and fighter jets zoom over. Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, which is a sentence that remains difficult to process, has suggested the Vatican “stick to matters of morality.” At no point has anyone in the administration identified which matters of morality remain available to them. Presumably none.
During a recent prayer vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo condemned “the idolatry of self and money” and “the display of power,” phrases the Vatican press office has declined to attach to any specific individual, but literally everyone knows who he’s talking about. Observers in Rome note that the pontiff’s tone throughout has remained calm, measured, and entirely unsurprised, as though he has seen this act before. Specifically in a studio on Bradley Place, in the winter of 1962, where he watched a real clown perform with considerably more professionalism and a much better wig.
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