Last week, Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, made history when he became the first pontiff from the United States.
Although he was born and raised in Chicago, research shows Leo XIV’s ancestry can be traced back to New Orleans.
In an interview with Louisiana Considered, Jari Honora, a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, shares what he uncovered about the pope’s Louisiana lineage.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KAREN HENDERSON: So what set you off into this rabbit hole to look into the new pope's family lineage? And once you got started with this digging, what were some of the first things that you discovered?
JARI HONORA: Well, as I've said a few times now, I was pleasantly surprised like I think so many people around the world and especially here in the U.S. that the Holy Father is an American. And with a name like Prevost, and coming from Chicago, I knew in the line of work that I'm in, that so many people in that Great Lakes region, you know, Michigan, Illinois, even up, you know, upstate New York, if they have these French surnames, [they’re] usually French Canadian, um, maybe immigrants from France.
And that's what I really was expecting to find. And for the most part, that's true of his father's family: French and Italian immigrants. But when I just shifted on a whim to his mother's family, that's when I discovered first a connection to New Orleans. And then as I saw some of the surnames, it hit me almost instantly that these were individuals from our rich, Creole of color community here in New Orleans.
And that was thrilling. I come from that community, as my last name gives away. I am a Catholic as well, and so I was just thrilled that the city has this strong, strong link to our new pope.
HENDERSON: So, as you said, you discovered his maternal grandmother has Creole roots of color. What exactly does that mean and what does that tell us about her identity?
HONORA: Well, contrary to what you just said and to what some news coverage is saying — maternal grandmother and grandfather. Some people were a little bit thrown off because there are records which indicate that his grandfather was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But even with that, his family was a Louisiana family who were perhaps living temporarily in Haiti, but all four of his great-grandparents — the mother side and the father side — were from Louisiana, from New Orleans, in and around the 7th Ward. And when we say Creole of color, you know, first of all, the term Creole, Louisiana Creole, indicates nothing about race. There are white people who are Louisiana Creoles. There are.
People of color who are Louisiana Creoles, the people with Indigenous and all sorts of mixtures, of those groups, including of course West African, who are Louisiana Creoles. It's a cultural designation. We are the people who've been here, almost, well since the very beginning we're the people rooted in Louisiana since our Colonial days.
And really it distinguishes us from, as my great-grandparents would say, and lots of others. The American people, the ones who came here and are still coming here from elsewhere who are not rooted here. So that's why it seems like they're just a maybe one or two degrees of separation. And the same thing is true of the Holy Father's family.
They were solidly rooted in New Orleans. So, some point around 1910, 1911, when they moved to Chicago, they made that part of that great migration up north to Illinois.
HENDERSON: Now Jari, what, what have you been able to find out about what their lives were like back when they lived here in New Orleans?
HONORA: We know that they lived, as I said, in the 7th Ward neighborhood, primarily in the 1900 census. His grandparents and the oldest of his aunts, the Holy Father's mother was one of seven girls in that family. Joseph Novell Martinez and Louise B. Martinez, were at 1933 North P Street, which is just a few steps off of North Claiborne Avenue. And like so many structures in that community, their house, the, the building that was their home was taken by the Claiborne overpass project. His grandfather worked as a Somar cigar maker, both here and, at times, up in Chicago, and the grandmother raised her large family of daughters.
Their earlier ancestors were tailors. And I think there was one or two cigar makers–all professions that were very common for the men in that community.
HENDERSON: It sounds like the pope has a mixed ethnic identity and background. Has he or anyone in his family spoken about this before?
HONORA: Well, in some interviews over the last few days, his two brothers have been asked about this and presented with sort of the findings that I made and that others have been sharing and reposting and they were not aware. They were very much reared as sort of mid-20th century Chicago boys. And there were not many discussions of family history or of ancestry and that's not surprising in so many families who make that shift in racial identity to pass for white, or as we say in Louisiana to passé blanc. It comes with basically, you know, wiping out any traces of the family history, any connections to the home place, which, you know, is usually Louisiana or the Gulf Coast. So no, there was really no familiarity with it.
HENDERSON: What else are you looking to find? Is there anything else that you're researching, anything that looks interesting that you're investigating?
HONORA: Sure. We're just hoping to fully flesh out the Holy Father's maternal family. I can tell you that as I mentioned, all four of his maternal great-grandparents were from Louisiana and at present, somewhere around five out of his eight great-great-grandparents on his mother's side, were all rooted here in Louisiana.
There are some connections to Guadalupe, to Cuba, and of course to France, like so many of us in Louisiana. And of course there are strong ties to Africa, west Africa in particular, but so many people were brought here as enslaved labor. I can tell you tha to date–and we are early on in this–it's only been about three or four days–I have identified a few enslaved individuals, who are ancestors of the Holy Father. And I think that that is very important. It links him in a very special way to the Black Catholic community, not just in Louisiana, but around this country, who have, you know, the roots of Black Catholicism go back in both freedom and enslavement to the very beginning, almost.
HENDERSON: What do you think this means to the New Orleans community, specifically the Catholic community, that the Pope has local connections here, and how have people been responding to, to the extent that I've been able to check social media and. Ha, lots of phone calls and, and emails and what have you? People are ecstatic.
HONORA: They are just thrilled that this puts the Catholic community here in New Orleans in the spotlight, we know those of us who are from New Orleans that this city is so–has such deep historical and cultural ties to Catholicism. I like to say that everybody in New Orleans is Catholic, even if it's just culturally out calendar is punctuated with feast days and even Mardi Gras itself is tied into the liturgical calendar of the of the Church. But I, I think for Americans as a whole, when they think of Catholic cities, they think Boston, Chicago, places that have these large ethnic populations, maybe Irish or Sicilian or Italian. They don't necessarily think of what they perceive as the big party town of New Orleans as also being a town that has a rich, rich faith history. But we do, and its evidence itself with the, the first American pope whose mother's faith, that he's alluded to his mother several times in interviews, came from here.
He's mentioned that he was open to a call to the priesthood, to a vocation, because his home as a boy. There were always neighborhood priests in and out because they loved his mother's cooking, and we know why now because she was a New Orleans cook. Probably really rare up there in their neighborhood in Chicago.
