As if straight out of a manuscript lost among the high shelves of a baroque library—the kind with staircases on wheels and secrets bound in goatskin—it has been revealed that Pope Leo XIV, or Robert Francis Prevost in his previous incarnations, has Creole roots deeply tied to New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. This makes him, among other things, the first pope with a lineage capable of improvising a Hail Mary in 5/4 time.
The revelation was discovered by Jari Honora, a local historian and, according to archival rumors, a kind of adventurous librarian with the soul of a marching band saxophonist. Honora dusted off marriage records, 19th-century censuses, and birth certificates as if he were unearthing first editions of banned authors. And what he found was pure gold: the pope’s maternal lineage goes back to Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, a couple who lived—or rather narrated their existence—in the Seventh District, that corner where Catholic history and Creole culture share a pew in the choir.
The couple married in 1887 in a church that, if you say it with the right intonation, sounds like the title of a nineteenth-century mystical novel: Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Corazón (Our Lady of the Sacred Heart). According to records, they lived on North Prieur Street—an address that sounds more like a chapter title than a street—and later emigrated to Chicago, like so many characters in a post-Gothic novel trying to reinvent themselves far from the heat and the clarinet.
Mildred Martinez, daughter of that union, was born in 1912 and, like many protagonists of forgotten stories, inherited a Creole identity carefully concealed between torn pages. In an alternative version of the family history, her brother—and the pope’s uncle—declared that the family “did not identify as Afro-American.” A denial that resonates like a suspended, dissonant chord, floating in the air before the inevitable documentary resolutio.
The documents, however, do not improvise. They play the notes as they were written: in black ink on worn paper, with marginal notes like comments from a divine editor. According to Honora, the Pope’s grandfather was probably born in Haiti or the Dominican Republic, adding another melodic line to this genealogical solo. A Creole counterpoint that resonates from the Caribbean to the corridors of the Vatican.
This lineage makes Pope Leo XIV a sort of character out of a historical novel with a modal jazz soundtrack: half pontiff, half silent narrator of a colorful Catholic tradition that for centuries played on street corners, amid incense and cigar smoke.
And so, the papacy is enriched with one foot in the Apostolic Library and the other in Preservation Hall. As if there were more of a connection between the illuminated codices of the Church Fathers and Louis Armstrong’s vinyl records than Rome was willing to admit.
For now, His Holiness has not commented publicly on his Creole ancestry. But we would not be surprised if one day, between encyclicals, he slips in a phrase that is not in Latin, but in the secret code of all initiates: “Everything I know about grace, I learned listening to my grandmother humming New Orleans rhythms in her kitchen.”
