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That the new pontiff’s ancestry can be partially traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture in New Orleans has brought joy to some Catholics.
May 9, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
When Pope Leo XIV emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as the new head of the Catholic Church on Thursday, the Rev. Lawrence Ndlovu of Johannesburg could not help but wonder at the shade of his skin.
“‘You’re not the classical white sort of person,’” Father Ndlovu said he had been thinking while watching from South Africa. “But I couldn’t figure out, What are you?”
The revelation that Pope Leo is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans, including some with potential ties to the Caribbean, has excited Father Ndlovu and other Catholics around the world, particularly those in Africa and other places with deep African ancestry. Several have said they saw him as one of their own — someone they could better relate to and who may champion their causes.
“He’s not foreign to us,” Father Ndlovu said. “There is a part of him that is also us.”
There remains some uncertainty around Leo’s racial ancestry.
Various records listed his maternal grandfather’s birthplace as the Dominican Republic, “Hayti” or Louisiana and describe his maternal grandparents as Black or mulatto. They once lived in the Seventh Ward in New Orleans, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.
Edwin Espinal Hernández, the director of the law school and a genealogist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, said he and other experts had found some indications that the pope’s grandfather was born in Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.
