CNA Staff, Feb 7, 2025 /
15:30 pm
Virginia McCaskey, principal owner of the Chicago Bears football team and a committed pro-life Catholic, died Thursday at age 102.
“While we are sad, we are comforted knowing Virginia Halas McCaskey lived a long, full, faith-filled life and is now with the love of her life on earth,” her family said in a statement as reported by the Chicago Tribune.
A deeply dedicated Catholic and mother of 11 who was referred to as “The First Lady of the NFL,” McCaskey for over four decades quietly guided the team that her father, George “Papa Bear” Halas, founded. Halas, a legendary coach, was also a co-founder of the NFL and lends his name to the NFC Championship trophy.
After her only sibling and the team’s original heir, George “Mugs” Halas Jr., died unexpectedly in 1979, McCaskey reluctantly inherited ownership of the Bears when her father died in 1983. Three years later, the Bears won their first Super Bowl.
Though the team has yet to hoist the Vince Lombardi trophy since then and various Bears executives have attracted fans’ ire over the years, McCaskey herself was “always was respected and admired in Chicago and NFL circles alike,” a Tribune columnist noted.
McCaskey’s husband of over 60 years, Ed, died in 2003. She is survived by nine of her 11 children — six boys and three girls, two sons having died of cancer — as well as 21 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“Faith, family, and football — in that order — were her north stars and she lived by the simple adage to always ‘do the right thing,’” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a Thursday statement.
“The Bears that her father started meant the world to her, and he would be proud of the way she continued the family business with such dedication and passion.”
Faith journey
Virginia Marion Halas McCaskey was born on Jan. 5, 1923. Her father, George, wrote in his autobiography that he was so certain she would be a boy that he and his wife “didn’t even have a name for a girl.”
Her parents were both children of immigrants, her mother being a German Lutheran and her father a Czech Catholic, McCaskey explained in a 2015 interview posted to YouTube.
McCaskey’s paternal grandmother, who lived with them for part of every year, prayed the rosary every day, and McCaskey later realized many of her grandmother’s prayers “must have been for me and my brother.” Later in life, McCaskey’s mother converted to Catholicism.
The young McCaskey was educated by Benedictine sisters at St. Hillary’s elementary school for eighth grade and Chicago’s now-shuttered St. Scholastica High School before attending college at Drexel Institute, now Drexel University, in Philadelphia.
Through a Bible study class in the early 1970s, McCaskey said she got connected to the devotional group World Apostolate of Fatima, formerly the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima. She also became acquainted with mothers of girls attending Willows Academy, a local all-girls school under the care of the Catholic personal prelature Opus Dei. McCaskey later became a cooperator to support the work of Opus Dei.
McCaskey said over the years she cultivated spiritual practices such as attending early morning daily Mass, taking time for praying the rosary and personal prayer, listening to Relevant Radio, and reading spiritual books. In her later life, she would often offer Nativity sets as gifts to families to help them celebrate the Advent and Christmas seasons.
She added that she and her husband tried to raise their large family “God’s way.” The family gathered to pray the rosary almost every night after dinner.
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Pat McCaskey, Ed and Virginia’s fourth child and a Bears vice president and board member, expressed appreciation for the strong faith his mother and father passed on to him and his family in an interview with the National Catholic Register in 2018.
A frequent speaker at the March for Life Chicago, the younger McCaskey co-founded Sports Faith International, an organization that honors “people who are successful in sports while leading exemplary lives.”
“For our family, being Catholic is not incidental … Being a good Catholic is more important than winning, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win as a good Catholic. Ideally, the two go together,” Pat McCaskey told the Register.
‘Countless lives have been saved’
American Life League (ALL), a Virginia-based national pro-life group, praised McCaskey on Thursday as one of the group’s “dearest supporters.”
“Through the work and tireless support of the McCaskey family, there is no doubt that countless lives have been saved,” ALL said Thursday.
Speaking to ALL’s magazine in 2020, McCaskey related the story of how in the early days of her marriage, she and her husband learned that an abortion facility would soon open directly across the street from their local hospital.
“It felt like a personal attack on our values and our neighborhood,” McCaskey recalled.
“We knew we needed to do something more than write letters and write a few small checks to different organizations,” she continued, saying she soon after learned about the pro-life advocacy work of ALL and remained a strong supporter of the organization for the rest of her life.
“These people were going all out for what they believed in. They were giving more than just lip service to the cause,” McCaskey said of ALL.
She told the magazine she was particularly thankful to God for the invention of the sonogram because a mother “can face the reality that this is a living child,” not a blob of tissue.
In 2009, McCaskey received a “People of Life” award from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-life Activities. The People of Life award is presented to individuals who have “demonstrated their lifetime commitment to the pro-life movement, to promoting respect for the dignity of the human person, and to advocacy for an end to the culture of death in this nation.”
“I accept this on behalf of all the little old ladies who … write checks, and pray rosaries, and listen to Relevant Radio and who usually struggle to get to daily Mass … I salute you,” McCaskey said in accepting the honor at the time.
Jonah McKeown is a staff writer and podcast producer for Catholic News Agency. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has worked as a writer, as a producer for public radio, and as a videographer. He is based in St. Louis.
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