Our Catholic faith doesn’t appear out of thin air, and it plays out incarnationally and across history. Faith comes from somewhere, and often, that somewhere is a someone, often visibly woven into our personal genealogies.
Everyone wants to claim some connection to our first American-born pope: Dolton, Ill. — the suburb just outside the southern limits of Chicago where the Prevost children grew up; Villanova University in Philadelphia where their youngest son went to college; St. Louis, where he entered the Augustinians; Chiclayo, Peru where Msgr. Prevost served as a missionary priest, and then bishop. Even Rome had a legitimate claim long before the name Robert Cardinal Prevost was announced from St. Peter’s loggia.
So, it comes as no surprise that there’s been a lot of Louisiana chatter about our new Holy Father’s Creole roots. The news of the pope’s ancestry flooded New Orleans news outlets within a few days of his election.
More recently, the story was published by the New York Times and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presented a copy of the pope’s lineage to him at the Vatican.
But locally, a well-researched and fascinating exhibit showing Pope Leo’s maternal family tree has drawn many to the Old Ursuline Convent Museum in the French Quarter. There, visitors can explore seven generations of the Holy Father’s New Orleans ancestors, leading back to the years just after the city’s founding in 1718. Supported by sacramental records still held in the cathedral archives, the story Pope Leo’s family tree tells is a uniquely Catholic and American one.
The pope’s family includes immigrants from Bohemia, France, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, Guadeloupe and Canada. Also among his predecessors are numerous men and women identified as people of color — some free and others born enslaved.
It appears that perhaps the only woman ever buried inside St. Louis Cathedral was one of the Holy Father’s forebears: a young woman of color who died in childbirth in 1799 and was interred near the Mary altar along with her baby. Family marriages and baptisms, too, can be found in New Orleans church records, some of which may have been thrown out of the windows during the famous Good Friday fire of 1788 by Père Antoine to save them.
In any case, what Pope Leo’s family tree reveals is the largely untold history of Black Catholics in colonies that eventually became part of the United States. This information, however, leaves us all with an unanticipated gift: the opportunity to recognize that the pope so many of us are excited about would not be who he is apart from the sad history of the African Diaspora caused by transatlantic slave trade and the complex racial history that followed in the wake of it.
If the Holy Father’s great-grandparents, Eugénie Grambois and Ferdinand Baquié, had not been baptized at the font in St. Louis Cathedral, (the only part of the church that survived the 1788 fire), chances are he would not have grown up Catholic. Nor would his maternal grandparents, the Martinez family, have likely chosen to make their home in Chicago without the Great Migration of 6 million people of color who left the American South for the promise of more economic opportunity and less racism at the beginning of the 20th century.
Our family histories vary widely. But all of us share a lineage of spiritual fathers and mothers whose words and deeds also make us what we are.
This summer, we observe the 1700th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Nicaea. Called by the unbaptized Emperor Constantine, the 318 bishops who gathered in Asia Minor defined what constituted Christian faith. Perhaps even more importantly, they determined what laid beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. If they had not done so — or if the Arians had prevailed — the past 17 centuries would have been different.
The faith we profess today in the Nicene Creed remains the dividing line between what is Christian and what isn’t. Every ecumenical council since has influenced the course of history and added to the family tree of our faith.
Our task as Catholics is not only to recognize where we have come from, but to hand on what we have received. Most of us do that in the ordinary rhythms of family life, as the Holy Father’s ancestors did. Some of us, like the Fathers of Nicaea, embrace the mission by making choices that have an impact far greater and more universal than even they imagine.
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