When the white smoke furled from the Sistine Chapel, Catholics everywhere—alongside the rest of the curious world—waited with bated breath. Then Robert Prevost walked out on the balcony to give his blessing, and the flurry of news about the Chicago-born pontiff started swirling. Peruvians celebrated the man who had spent twenty years living among them. The United States proudly claimed its first-ever American pope. Students at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University, where Prevost studied, were thrilled. So were the residents of his home city, despite some confusion about whether he identifies as a Cubs or White Sox fan. (A Southsider, he roots for the Sox.) But now there’s another group with a tie to the newly anointed Pope Leo XIV: the Creole community of New Orleans.
Crescent City genealogist Jari C. Honora did some sleuthing after taking an interest in the name “Prevost” and worked out that both of the pope’s maternal grandparents were Creole residents of New Orleans, reports NOLA’s WWL, The New York Times, and other outlets.
The Creole community has long been an ingredient in Louisiana’s vast melting pot and is itself a culture of mixed ancestry, primarily that of French and Spanish colonists, African people, and Native Americans. Historically some Creoles passed as white, but many lived as free people of color, and lots of them were Catholic. In fact, New Orleans is home to the oldest Catholic church in the country created by and for African Americans; St. Augustine opened its doors in 1842, built at the request of free people of color.
According to Honora’s research, both of Pope Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents, Joseph Norval Martinez and Louise Baquié, appear in New Orleans historical records and are described as Black or mulatto. They lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, a traditionally Creole and Catholic area, and married there in 1887 at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church on Annette Street.
The pope’s mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1912. Her birth in the city coincided with the early years of the Great Migration, a period between the 1910s and the ’70s when approximately six million Black people left the South and moved to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states. Chicago attracted more than 500,000 hopeful residents, and though there isn’t an agreed-upon number of New Orleanians who made that specific move, the ensuing link between the New Orleans and Chicago jazz scenes is a well-explored one.
Prevost himself was born in the Windy City in 1955 and grew up attending school and church at St. Mary of the Assumption. That upbringing laid a foundation that would take him all over the world and, ultimately, to Rome. Though Leo XIV is undoubtedly a global pope and a citizen of the world, the South—and its uniquely rich tapestry of cultures—can claim a little piece of him, too.
