Jari Honora, a genealogist based in New Orleans, was not looking for a papal connection when the name Robert Prevost — Pope Leo XIV’s birth name — resonated with the city’s layered past. What he found in the dusty pages of antebellum census records, he said, was a direct line from the new leader of the Catholic Church to the free Black community that carved out lives in pre-Civil War Louisiana.
Honora’s research, completed shortly after Pope Leo’s election, showed that all four of the pontiff’s maternal great-grandparents were enumerated as free people of color in the 19th century. “Free person of color” was a legal designation in Louisiana’s caste system, marking people of African descent who were not enslaved and often had European and Native American ancestry. The region’s unique blending of French, Spanish, African and Native American influences created what is now known as Creole culture, a heritage that now extends to the papacy.
The discovery adds a new facet to the story of the first pope from the Americas. Pope Leo XIV, a former auxiliary bishop of Chicago, has not publicly commented on the genealogical findings, but the revelation has stirred attention among historians of race and religion who have long argued that Black Catholic history remains underrepresented in mainstream narratives of the American church. The Associated Press, which first reported Honora’s findings, noted that the pope’s Creole heritage highlights the “complex history of racism” in the Catholic Church in America.
Scholars such as Shannen Dee Williams, author of Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle, have documented the deep roots of Black Catholics that the discovery brings to the fore. The pope’s own ancestry includes people who were likely of African, European and Indigenous heritage — families who built churches, businesses and legacies despite the constant threat of re-enslavement and the rising tide of Jim Crow.
The revelation arrives as the Vatican, under Pope Leo, has taken steps to acknowledge its role in legitimizing slavery and to elevate the stories of Black Catholics. In the United States, where the church’s ties to slavery and segregation have often been downplayed, the pope’s own family history may serve as a personal connection to that larger, and still unfinished, reckoning.