(ZENIT News / Miami, 06.18.2025).- In a discovery that is reshaping both ecclesiastical and cultural narratives, genealogists have revealed that Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost, carries one of the most intricate and globally interconnected family trees ever documented for a world leader. Less than 24 hours after his election to the papacy, researchers collaborating with The New York Times uncovered his African American ancestry—tracing back to his maternal grandparents in New Orleans’ historic Seventh Ward.
But the story doesn’t stop there. With support from American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, scholars mapped over 100 of the pope’s ancestors across 15 generations, spanning four continents and offering a vivid portrait of the Americas: a tangle of colonial legacies, migration, resilience, and faith. Pope Leo’s background isn’t merely diverse—it is emblematic of the layered and often paradoxical histories of race, class, and belonging in the Western Hemisphere.
His maternal line arcs back to 16th-century Spain, where four of his ancestors were listed as minor nobility—hidalgos—in a 1573 census in the northern town of Isla. These included Diego de Arana Valladar, a Spanish naval officer who fought Dutch privateers, and his son Diego de Arana Isla, who served in Panama as a captain of artillery. Remarkably, the pope’s extended family tree also links him—through a collateral line—to Antonio José de Sucre, the revolutionary general and statesman who helped secure South American independence alongside Simón Bolívar and served as Bolivia’s first constitutional president.
From Spain, the family journeyed through Cuba, where several generations were born in Havana before branching out to Louisiana. There, a very different history unfolded. The pope’s maternal ancestors include both enslaved individuals and free people of color who became landowners—and, in a morally complex twist, slaveholders themselves. One ancestor, Marie Jeanne, was freed in 1772 and by the time of her death owned over 1,000 acres of land and more than 20 enslaved people. Another, María Luisa, was born into slavery and later became a property owner in Opelousas, Louisiana.
This dual legacy—of bondage and ownership, of oppression and agency—is perhaps the most haunting and revealing aspect of Pope Leo’s genealogy. Seventeen of his ancestors appear in historical records as “free people of color” or “mulatto,” categories that defined a distinctive creole class in colonial Louisiana. In some cases, Black families bought enslaved relatives to protect them from forced sale, a practice that testifies to the brutal calculus of survival under slavery.
On his father’s side, Pope Leo’s story winds through Sicily, where five generations of his paternal ancestors lived before his grandfather, Salvatore Riggitano Alito, emigrated to the U.S. in 1905. Salvatore was originally preparing for the priesthood but ultimately left the seminary and began a relationship with Suzanne Fontaine, a French immigrant. Their children, born outside of marriage, took the surname Prevost, inherited from Salvatore’s mother—thus bestowing on the pope a French surname despite his deeply Italian paternal heritage.
Adding yet another layer to this transcontinental tapestry is Pope Leo’s connection to Canada’s early French settlers. Through his French-Canadian lineage, he shares distant ancestry (distant cousins) with a curious cast of public figures: Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Angelina Jolie, Jack Kerouac, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, and Madonna—all tracing their roots back to Quebec in the 17th century.
If Pope Leo XIV is a spiritual leader for a global Church, his bloodlines already made him global long before his election. His heritage bridges North and South, Europe and the Americas, the colonizer and the colonized, the enslaved and the free. It tells a story not just of one man, but of centuries of migration, trauma, aspiration, and resilience.
This genealogy, meticulously pieced together by Jari C. Honora and chronicled by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New York Times Magazine, reframes our understanding of who the pope is—and what he symbolizes. It sheds light on the enduring complexity of racial and cultural identity in the Americas, particularly in places like Louisiana, where social hierarchies once pivoted on subtleties of skin color, wealth, and European proximity.
Far from being a curiosity, the story of Pope Leo’s lineage is a mirror to the world he now shepherds. In its contradictions and beauty, its pain and pride, his ancestry speaks to the Church’s growing universality and the lived histories of its people.
In Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican now has a pontiff who not only understands the theological meaning of incarnation, but whose own family embodies a continent’s worth of spiritual and historical complexity. He is, in the truest sense, a pan-American pope—and perhaps the most genealogically representative leader the Church has ever known.
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