Ever since those velvet curtains parted to reveal that Robert Francis Prevost—aka Leo XIV—was the next pope of the Roman Catholic Church, journalists and meme-makers alike began joyously delighting in his peculiarities. The first pope born in the United States! The first Peruvian pope! The first Chicagoan pope! The first DelCo pope! (Fine, he was only at Villanova for a couple years. We still want to know his Wawa order.) The first Creole pope with roots in Black Catholic Louisiana! He’s a White Sox fan! He plays Wordle with his brother every morning! The pope: he’s just like us!
Leo XIV’s story invites US Americans, and US Catholics in particular, to see their own pasts from new angles. His story and family’s stories speak to an American Catholic history most people don’t know—stories erased, obscured, and ignored for far too long. Prevost’s grandparents were Creole Catholics from New Orleans who joined the millions of Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South to make a new life in the urban North and West roughly between 1910 and 1970, a period best known as “the Great Migration(s).” If Francis, the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, was the “immigrant pope,” then maybe we should know Leo as the “migrations pope.”
A Great Migrations pope?
Most Americans wouldn’t associate the Great Migrations story with Catholics—and most Catholics aren’t aware of Catholicism’s place in the migrations. Those who know this history at all might think about how the spread of Black Holiness traditions transformed Black Protestantism on a national scale, or how Black migration from the South and Caribbean gave birth to religio-racial movements that reinvented Blackness itself. Meanwhile, “American Catholic” tends to invoke Irish immigrants to Boston or Italian immigrants to New York. Most assume the story of US Catholicism starts with white European immigrants to East Coast cities and peaks with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Leo XIV’s family history offers us a much more complex story about US Catholicism that could not be more quintessentially American. His father’s side is French and Italian; his mother’s side is Spanish and African, likely by way of Cuba, Haiti, and, undoubtedly, the Creole community in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. (As we learned when historian and genealogist Jari Honora’s discovery put this story on the map for all of us!) The new pope’s genealogy insists the story of US American Catholicism begins before the founding of the United States, in the cosmopolitan gulf coastal crossroads city of New Orleans, a distinctly Black and Catholic city once at the center of a global economy defined by enslavement.
Pope Leo’s familial history tells a story of Catholicism shaped by colonial encounters across the African diaspora, shifting regimes of racialization and eventually the transformations ushered in by the Great Migrations. As I chart in Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, the migrations had a transformative and enduring impact on the religious landscape of Catholic America in ways that remain largely absent from mainstream American religious history.
Black Catholics in the migrations
When Pope Leo’s grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquiex, left New Orleans for Chicago, they were categorized variously as “mulatto” and “black.” They arrived on the South Side of Chicago in the 1910s, among the vanguard of wave after wave of Black migrants who would arrive in the decades to come.
Creole Catholics in Louisiana gave birth to their own distinctive Black Catholic culture over the course of centuries. They carried that Catholicism with them as they traveled north, where they madex new lives alongside the diverse religious cultures of other Black communities, amidst the robust Catholic infrastructures, and among the white missionary orders operating in cities like Chicago. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago’s Black Catholic population numbered in the hundreds and met in the basement of a single segregated church. By 1975, they had grown to 80,000 strong, vaulting the Midwest Metropolis into the second largest Black Catholic population in the country, surpassing even New Orleans. Whether they knew it or not, Pope Leo’s grandparents were part of this transformative moment in Catholic history.
But Pope Leo’s childhood invites us to consider another Great Migrations story as well. His mother’s birth certificate categorized Mildred Agnes Martinez (the daughter of Joseph and Louise), as “white.” Racial passing—and even active “forgetting” of African ancestry—was a not-uncommon Black survival strategy and indeed, could be an avenue to success in a white supremacist society.
Mildred gave birth to her son, future pope Robert Francis, in Mercy Hospital in 1955, not far from the historic Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. He wasn’t raised in the Black Metropolis, though. Black migrants’ arrival in neighborhoods long dominated by white Catholics sparked a “flight and fight” response. White Catholics massively resisted attempts to desegregate parish neighborhoods and many soon fled to the suburbs, where they also reinforced a rigid segregated system. Robert Francis was raised in one of the many far South Side suburbs that remained overwhelmingly until the 1990s.
Which America’s pope?
If Leo XIV is the first US American pope, it’s worth pausing to ask which “America” we’re talking about. The Prevosts’ story is a quintessentially US American Catholic one—and at the same time, this history would surprise, confuse, and disorient many Americans (and, frankly, most American Catholics). Pope Leo XIV’s family history traces a religious geography that unsettles familiar tales of white European immigrants. His is not the story of persecuted European immigrants assimilating into the (white) American mainstream. His is a story of European and African and Creole and Black Catholics whose intersecting lives made and remade Catholicism, all while governed by regimes of racialization and white supremacist violence.
By virtue of his election alone (and the wonderful flurry of genealogical and historical work it unleashed), Pope Leo XIV invites us to reconsider, and perhaps relearn, US Catholic history. His family’s story challenges many Americans to see what Black and Creole Catholics—from Chicago to New Orleans and everywhere in between—have long known: that the story of US American Catholicism is the story of their lives and that of their ancestors.
