As the first Catholic Pope of the United States, Pope Leo XIV has an ancestry that goes back to the Creole and Louisiana’s free people, who illustrates complex and interconnected issues of race and class in US history.
“His rise is not just a religious milestone, it is a historical statement,” said the general -official general and former official archivist of the state of Louisiana, Alex Dapaul Lee, about the man previously known as Cardinal Robert Prevost.
When Lee first listened to the Creole roots of the Pope of the Pope’s genealogist Jamarlon Glenn, he replied: “There is no way,” Lee said with a smile. “But then I started going down a burrow of the investigation.”
Lee, the founder of Alex Genealogy and the investigators of the genealogy of southwest Louisiana, discovered trova of documents in their collection and gathered records of their genealogist network that confirmed information about the background of Pope Leo. He also showed generations of Catholicism within the Premost family.
“It didn’t take me for a long time to realize that it was a Creole of the seventh room of New Orleans, Louisiana, who was an outstanding place for Louisiana Creoles,” he said.
The news of the Pope’s Creole roots was also pointed out by the genealogist Jari C. Honora. Leo’s brother, John Prevost, confirmed the connection with the New York Times and said that he and his brothers had never talked about it. “It was never a problem,” said John Prevost al Times.
Although his paternal surname, “Prevost”, is common in Louisiana, Lee said that a strong Creole connection was found in Pope Leo maternal Ancestry: His Celeste Lemelle great -great -grandmother was the daughter of two free people, Louis Lemelle and Celeste Olimpie Grandpres. They married Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1798, and legally classified themselves as “Quadroons”.
“That meant that they would have a fourth African ancestry or it could have been a native American ancestry,” Lee said.
The Creole community emerged in Louisiana due to the combination of cultures there. French, American, Spanish, German and descendants of the countries of Western Africa cohabited in the region during the pre -colonial era when France and Spain possessed the territory of Louisiana.
In Louisiana during the eighteenth century, there were three main racial categories: the enslaved free, couleur gens (color -free people/Creole of color) and the kind of white planter, according to Lee.
The classifications within the Creole community were based on legal status and racial identity, with other categories such as “Mulatto” and “Octoroon” often appearing within historical documents, Lee said. He added that there were also Creoles of color possessed enslaved at that time. The documentation shows that the Lemelle family once owned enslaved people.
Lee said the Lemelle family, which tracked their wealth in livestock, became one of the most prominent Creole families during the Louisiana period in Louisiana.
The Pope’s great -grandmother, Celeste Lemelle, was a woman free of color and documents that show that they gave her a business owned by Ferdinand Gayarré in December 1833. In addition, she also received land in 1850 from Frédéric Guimont, a merchant with whom she had several children. The transaction was irrevocable as a way of protecting his property, Lee said.
“One of Louisiana’s most important things was that women could have properties and have owned properties since its beginning early, especially free women,” Lee said.
Lee pointed out where you can see the change in racial identity within Pope Leo’s family during the 19th century.
The son of Celeste Lemelle, Ferdinand David Baquie, born in New Orleans on October 10, 1837, was included as a “Mulatto” in the 1870 census. But in 1880, he and his whole family appeared as whites.
In terms of how Pope Leo’s family ended in Illinois, Lee said his family was probably part of the hundreds of other Louisiana Creoles that they emigrated north during the first wave of the great migration in early 1900.
“Illinois once was part of Louisiana’s territory. They had an old position called Kaskaskia, where they had some of the first Creole people,” said Lee, adding that people of color would have had more job opportunities and better civil liberties in the northern state.
“Taking into account the fact that many of these families went through White in Chicago they meant that they were going to be more successful, regardless of their appearance.”
Lee said that it is remarkable that the Pope’s racial background reflects the various mixtures of cultures that have historically merged to form the unique identity of Louisiana.
“In the United States, many people think everything is just black or black,” he said. “But it is important to keep in mind that the ancestry of the Pope represents a more inclusive vision of what it means to be Catholic, and what it means to be an American with the Creole ties of Louisiana. This is more than just genealogy, it is a legacy.”
