SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
This past weekend, tens of thousands of people packed Chicago's Rate Field to celebrate the election of the first American pope. Pope Leo XIV addressed the crowd at the White Sox homefield in a video recording.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
POPE LEO XIV: To, once again, the young people who are gathered here, I'd like to say that you are the promise of hope for so many of us. The world looks to you as you look around yourselves, and says, we need you.
DETROW: As soon as then-Cardinal Robert Prevost was elevated to pope in May, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the team he works with for PBS's "Finding Your Roots" show began digging into the pope's family history. Gates recently published the findings in the New York Times, and it turns out the first American pope has a quintessentially American history filled with immigrants, slave owners, enslaved people, scandals and more. Gates joins us now. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR: Thanks. It's great to be back on the show.
DETROW: You wrote that this is one of the most diverse family trees we have ever created. Tell me why that is.
GATES: Well, let me tell you how I got interested in this in the first place. I'm flying back from Phoenix to Boston, and I'd given a lecture at the University of Arizona. And right before I left for the airport, the news broke that the white smoke had appeared. And I don't know about you, but since Pope John XXIII, I've been fixated on that chimney...
DETROW: Yeah.
GATES: ...You know, on TV, waiting for that magical white smoke. So there it was, and it was an American. So I thought that was cool. So I go to the airport, get on the plane. You know, we're halfway across the country, and I get this text. And the text was from Darren Walker and Dean Baquet. And Darren Walker, as you know, is the esteemed president of the Ford Foundation, and Dean Baquet is the former executive editor of the New York Times - a Black man from New Orleans. And the text read, Skip, the pope is Black. Dean knows his family. And I went, oh, my God. You know, I would have thought it was a joke if it hadn't been from them.
DETROW: Yeah.
GATES: And I get a zillion emails from well-meaning people saying, dear Professor Gates, you must ask the pope to be a guest on "Finding Your Roots."
DETROW: (Laughter).
GATES: And so I was thinking of, yeah, Your Holiness, could you lower your miter a little bit so we can make the frame?
DETROW: (Laughter).
GATES: Your Holiness, could you spit in this test tube, please - you know?
(LAUGHTER)
GATES: But here's what we found. Well, the first issue was, quote-unquote, "how Black is the pope?" Of the over 100 ancestors that we found, 17 are Black. But the most ancestors are from France - 41; Italy, 24 - and by the way, both Sicily and Milano - Spain, 21; USA, 21, including those 17 Black people, nine from Cuba, six from Canada, one from Haiti and one from Guadalupe.
DETROW: There's two particular people and two particular moments I'd love to talk about. First, can you tell me about the literal front-page scandal his grandfather fell into that directly led to Pope Leo's existence?
GATES: Oh, my God. Well, Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano Alito was married to a woman named Daisy, and somewhere along the way, things went awry and Salvatore fell in love with another lady - Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine. And they had an affair. Daisy filed suit, sought a warrant on behalf of, you know, herself, and said the two were, quote-unquote, "mixed up improperly." And in the same article, it is mentioned that Salvatore had attended seminary to become a priest, but couldn't take his vows. And that extramarital affair produced a son out of wedlock - Jean (ph), or Jean in French, the pope's uncle - as well as a second son named Louis, who is the pope's father. And Salvatore gave them both a new name. He took his maternal grandmother's maiden name, which was Prevost. So no more Salvatore Alito was there left in New Orleans. Isn't that a fascinating story?
DETROW: I just love the fact that a moment of scandal and sin directly leads to a pope.
GATES: Yeah. Yeah, and...
DETROW: I think there's a lot there if you want to layer on it. It's just so interesting.
GATES: Yeah, and his ancestor - so obviously the pope wasn't the first person on his family tree to think about being a priest.
DETROW: Yeah. We talked about the Black people in the pope's family tree. We talked about the fact that this included enslaved people, people trying to stay out of slavery. What should we know about the slave owners in his family history?
GATES: Well, what's interesting is that we found - not surprisingly, for a person from the South - we found that 12 of his ancestors owned slaves. But here's the punchline. Of those 12, four were white and eight were Black. And most people don't even know that - I think, that Black people owned slaves. But if we take the year 1830, about 1% of the free Black population owned slaves. Now, 40% of them owned only one. Often, historians think that they were a family member. That the person would keep them under ownership in order to protect them from being, you know, sold to someone else. But the maximum number owned by that group of Black people in 1830 was 84. And the Pope's fourth great-grandmother, who is Marie-Jean (ph) in English, has an amazing story.
She was enslaved by a man named Francois Lemelle. They had a long-term relationship. She was his mistress. They had at least six children together. And in 1772, Francois freed Marie-Jean and two of their daughters. Francois died seven years later in 1789, and when he does, Scott, he leaves Marie-Jean one-fifth of his estate, which included 15 enslaved people. Now, did Marie-Jean liberate these people? Not a chance (laughter)
DETROW: Wow.
GATES: In 1817, her holdings had grown to 1,040 acres, including, by this time, a total of five slaves. She enslaved more than any of the Pope's other Black ancestors - a total of 20. And, you know, you ask yourself, well, why would Black people own slaves? Black people are just as complicated as anybody else. And where the average white person didn't own slaves, the average Black person obviously didn't own slaves, but some Black people did. And some Black people owned a lot of slaves, and Marie-Jean was one of them.
DETROW: Pope Leo is now an important historical figure in the United States of America, even though he's only been - that's been the case for a month. What do you think the story of the first American pope's family says about the broader American story?
GATES: Well, I mean, this guy is America writ small, as it were, in his genome. I mean, look at where his ancestors come from. His ancestors are white and Black, from France, from Italy, from Spain, from Cuba, Canada, Haiti, Guadalupe and of course from the United States. I think that he's - symbolically, he's the perfect pope because his very genome expresses the history of the world over the last 500 years.
DETROW: That is Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the PBS show "Finding Your Roots." Thank you so much for talking to us about this.
GATES: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
