From "New Pope Has Creole Roots in New Orleans/His ancestry, traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture, links Leo XIV to the rich and sometimes overlooked Black Catholic experience in America" (NYT).
ADDED: Haven't there been Popes of mixed race before — in all this long history? Grok offers 3 possibilities:
Pope Victor I (reigned 189–199 AD): Born in the Roman province of Africa (likely modern-day Tunisia or Libya), Victor I is often described as a native African. Some sources, including early Christian texts, suggest he may have been of Berber or Punic descent, but there’s no definitive evidence of his racial background. The term “African” in Roman contexts didn’t necessarily equate to sub-Saharan African ancestry, and racial categories were not recorded as they are today.
Pope Miltiades (reigned 311–314 AD): Also born in North Africa, Miltiades is sometimes referred to as an African pope. Like Victor, his exact ethnic or racial background is unclear, but he likely came from a region with a mix of Berber, Roman, and other Mediterranean peoples.
Pope Gelasius I (reigned 492–496 AD): Another pope from Roman Africa, Gelasius is noted for his African origin, but again, precise details about his ancestry are lacking. He may have been of Berber or mixed North African descent.
Posts
82 comments:
Well...not so's you'd know it.
“Creole people of color”? Ridiculous
As a Cubs fan, popeleo is well-acquainted with suffering.
Iman said...
As a Cubs fan, popeleo is well-acquainted with suffering.
The Cubs fan report is wrong. In an interview on Chicago TV yesterday his brother said Pope Leo has always been a Sox fan.
The Pope is a White Sox fan. The Cubs fans are all carpetbaggers from Iowa and western Michigan
In my perfect world, teh pope is an Angels fan. Eff Chicago.
Still waiting for the first Jewish Pope.
The one true pope will be an Indians fan.
Creole is a soup to me.
Temujin said...Still waiting for the first Jewish Pope.
The first pope was Jewish.
Temujin said...
Still waiting for the first Jewish Pope.
Peter, the first Pope was Jewish.
Well, c’mon down heah, cookya whole messa shrimp!
Creole Schmeole
Here we go. It will now be racist to criticize the new socialist pope. (Except about abortion and euthanasia, which are special exceptions to the rules).
In 1950s Chicago, he would have had to keep that ancestry on the down-low. His Augustinian high school might not even have been letting in blacks at that time.
JSM
"The Conclave" narrative!
He's from Chicago. He's Catholic. Lots of Catholic kids from Chicago go to Creighton. He would have been two years ahead of me at Creighton if he would have come to Omaha instead of Philly.
He was born in South America.. No?
Although Leo is older than I am, we're still within the same generation. It's mind-boggling to think of the pope having the same suburban American Catholic upbringing post Vatican II that I had.
I'm excited and hopeful.
Someone e-mailing me with confusion over the Francises
He's from Chicago. He's Catholic. Lots of Catholic kids from Chicago go to Creighton.
And Notre Dame, Loyola, DePaul, Marquette, SLU and non-Catholic schools, too. Those Catholic high schools in Chicago produce a lot of college-bound kids. I'm guessing going to Villanova was directly related to his attending the Augustinian seminary in Michigan before that.
Yes - he is American. North American.
Family roots near the gulf of America. (lol)
If both maternal grand parents were black/mulatto, then what was his mother? Why are they eliding?
I have never heard 'Creole' modified by 'color' -- and I lived for a time in suburban New Orleans. Trust the NYTimes to make everything about skin color.
"NOW it's a story boys!" - NYT editor
Looks like a honky to me.
He was a year behind me at Villanova, in the same year as my best friend, who was also a Math major and probably attended classes with him. Villanova attempted to be a Catholic university at that time, although many in the "guild" were schismatics even before JPII's papacy.
I have never heard 'Creole' modified by 'color' -- and I lived for a time in suburban New Orleans.
Well then, you obviously didn't spend much time learning about the culture and history of coastal Louisiana and New Orleans while you there.
NYT using the one drop rule for the Pope is a thing now, I guess.
He really is American, right down to being a Boomer, being from the suburbs, being Creole, being an ex-pat with all that that implies. Sometimes I've thought "he's the second South American Pope;" but, no, in the mystery, he is the First American Pope in every sense of the word.
is not only breaking ground as the first U.S.-born pontiff
Oh, goody! Another "Historic First™"!
Imagine that - he has a mixed bloodline, like the rest of the 8 billion of us. Now, what’re his plans for the papacy?
I’m gonna set yo hair on fiyo, talkin’ ‘bout…
https://youtu.be/HdrjOcSBfNY
Joseph Martinez doesn't sound like a creole name to me, but what do I know. Anyway if the Maternel Grandparents were mulatto, that means 1/2 black - at most. which means the Pope's at most 1/4 black. More likely 1/8. Not much "Color" in that "Person of color".
In any case, the family didn't identify as black, and probably passed for white. So, its a moot issue.
Much more important is the Pope's identification as a South American.
Duke Ellington - what great music. And I appreciate the camera staying on the musicians and not swooping around or panning to the crowd (if there was one).
I remember Venus Flytrap's (WKRP) other sitcom. According to the screenwriters, creole with a "capital C" is a racist reference to people of color lighter than a brown paper bag.
This calls for some Elvis.
King Creole
So the Times dives into identity politics and its corollary the “one drop” theory. For myself, I cannot imagine anything less interesting than musings about the possible racial heritage of some individual. It makes me think of the Southern Democrats of the 1960s insisting that intelligent Negroes had to have white blood in them (I.e., be of mixed racial heritage) to account for their 3 digit IQs.
Joseph Martinez doesn't sound like a creole name to me,
Again, you are apparently unaware of the cultural diversity of the New Orleans.
And there are lots of Catholics from Louisiana who aren't black or mixed-race. Among the early Louisiana Catholics, some were of Spanish descent. The Spanish Bourbons took over much of the French claims in North America in the wake of the Seven Years War. Napoleon regained the mouth of the Mississippi and it gargantuan and uncharted west bank for France through the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso which exchanged Spanish Louisiana for the Duchy of Parma. (Having reclaimed Louisiana, the Emperor of the French promptly offered it for sale to the United States.)
A larger group of non-black Catholics were the French colonists of Acadia, primarily the Canadian Maritimes today. Expelled from New France to make room for British settlers they became the Cajuns.
The creoles have a longer history dating to the reign of Louis XIV. Originally the term referred only to French who were native-born in Louisiana, whether their mothers were natively French, the usual case, Natchez, or African, the least-common case.
NYT is trying to infer something about Provost's ancestry without an atom of evidence, just another exercise in myth-making by a once-respectable newspaper.
Look out, National Enquirer, you're cherished spot in supermarket checkout line is severely coveted.
Another step to fulfilling my prophecy that over the next 50 years we will become such a mixed-race society that it will negate the very idea of race. Of course when I made that prediction the Democrats had not reverted to their current and also ancient "1-drop" absolutism on negroid blood.
"Iman said...
As a Cubs fan, popeleo is well-acquainted with suffering."
On a local Chicago news-talk broadcast this morning, "Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson on AM 560 The Answer", I heard the new Pope being a Cubs fan was misreported and he is, in fact, a Sox Fan. This would more closely coincide with the expectation since he is from the South side suburbs.
All three of the "African" popes had their origins in Roman province called Africa, which roughly corresponds to the coasts of Tunisia and Libya today. The people there were descendants of nearly every nationality that bordered on the Mediterranean, including Italians and Greeks. Grok also ignores the most important and numerous ethnicity of Africa -- the Levantines. Before Roman, the region was dominated by Carthage, a colony of Phoenicia.
If both maternal grand parents were black/mulatto, then what was his mother? Why are they eliding?
Louisiana Creoles were often very light-skinned people, frequently what used to be called "octoroon" or "high yaller" (i.e. yellow). The race-mixing barrier was never as strong in Louisiana as it was elsewhere in the Deep South, and marriages between whites and Creoles were pretty common. I expect there are lots of white-looking, white-identifying Louisianans who don't even know they are part black.
Even among the visibly-black population, there was (and by some accounts, still is) a hierarchy of coloration, with lighter-skinned people seeking out other people their shade of brown or even lighter, until they could pass the "paper bag" test.
My own very white family has a documented black ancestor, a freed slave who fought in the Revolutionary War and married a white widow afterwards. He probably was mulatto himself, with a black mother, and a father who was one of the scions of the very prominent New England family who owned her, and undoubtedly forced himself on her. It was a surprise to us, but the genealogical research was pretty convincing. DNA testing shows a trace of Papua New Guinea/Australian Aborigine ancestry, so we assume his mother was kidnapped from there and brought to Providence as a slave. My great-grandfather had very wavy black hair and dark brown eyes, and now we know why.
Another step to fulfilling my prophecy that over the next 50 years we will become such a mixed-race society that it will negate the very idea of race.
My son is marrying a South American girl whose ancestors come from Europe, China, South America, and Africa. We have small quantities of African and Native American ancestry too. Their children will look like Spaniards or Greeks and be considered white, although if affirmative action is still a thing when they are college age, I will be encouraging them to make the most of their non-white heritage.
“And there are lots of Catholics from Louisiana who aren't black or mixed-race.”
My partner’s family moved from NOLA to CA in the 1930s. French Catholics, they had been in LA since the 1700s. Likely Acadians. Apparently a good proportion of those from NOLA with her last name are black or creole.
Looking at pics of the pope, he seems even whiter than me.
Which is OK because I am a "person of color too" blue eyes (formerly) blond hair paper white skin and all.
I am Puerto Rican which automatically makes me a person of color.
Actual color has nothing at all to do with it.
It's all bullshit.
John Henry
This reminds me of Frank's Place, a sitcom from the late 1980's. Tim Reid, who was Venus Flytrap on WKRP, plays a Black Boston college professor who inherits a New Orleans restaurant from his father. He describes himself as a guy who watches PBS and drives a Volvo station wagon and finds himself in NOLA society. Episodes are available on YouTube.
Wouldn't Joseph Martinez be "hispanic" or "latino"?
John Henry
In the earlier decades of the internet, I belonged to NOML, (New Orleans Mailing List). It was there I first learned that "octoroon" meant 1/8 African blood. That old List was a great way for me to discover NOLA and I've visited about 7 times, twice since Katrina. Love the food, the history, the music, the architecture, and all the rest. Just not the Democrats. And the crime.
john mosby (9:02am):
"In 1950s Chicago, he would have had to keep that ancestry on the down-low. His Augustinian high school might not even have been letting in blacks at that time."
I find that very difficult to believe. My alma mater, a Catholic high school in the old Confederacy, was integrated from the day it opened in 1948. If visibly black students were welcome at Norfolk Catholic High School in the '40s, someone whose black ancestry was invisible would surely have been welcome at a Catholic high school in Chicago in the late '60s and early '70s, when he was in high school. How would they even have known about his mulatto ancestors? The Daughters of the Confederacy may demand a family tree, but I'm pretty sure Catholic high schools will welcome just about anyone who has successfully completed grade school, has no criminal record, and has relatives who can pay the tuition. If his parents bring him to church every Sunday, join in the hymns, and put money in the collection basket, all the more so.
By the way, I was over 30 before I learned that my alma mater was a joke up and down the East Coast, even among those who didn't know it existed. "Q. What's the football cheer at the Catholic high school in Norfolk, Virginia? A. We don't drink, we don't smoke, Norfolk! Norfolk! Norfolk!" (For those who don't already know, the L is silent.)
Love the food, the history, the music, the architecture, and all the rest. Just not the Democrats. And the crime.
Same, but I learned that they now have a special zone in the French Quarter where my concealed weapons permit is not honored, so I don't think I'll return.
We have small quantities of African and Native American ancestry too.
This is a typo. We have small amounts of Australian Aborigine blood, as I mentioned in an earlier post, not African. So my grandchildren will have ancestors from every continent but Antarctica.
We should require everyone to get a dna test and have the percent content by race tattooed to their foreheads, then we will have full information and cut out the bullshjt false advertising.
But this is a surprise. Prevost (Prevoost) can be a Dutch name, and someone online suggested that he was from South Holland, a once-predominantly Dutch-American city just south of Chicago.
Villanova was indeed founded by the Augustinians. There are a few high schools around the country founded by Augustinians. Not nearly as many as the Jesuits created.
"Creoles" (that is, white people of French or Spanish ancestry born in the New World) objecting to being taken for "creoles" (that is, people of mixed African and French or Spanish ancestry) is a familiar trope in history and literature.
Anatole Broyard, who wrote about books for the New York Times, was a mixed-race Creole. After he passed away, there was much talk about the revelation that he was black. Looking at photos of Broyard, one wonders how people could have missed that. I read Broyard's memoir when it was published and when I he mentioned his family having escaped or being refugees from Louisiana it certainly made a lightbulb go off.
The Cardinals elected a White Sox fan to lead the Padres.
When people started celebrating the "first American Pope," someone had to try and put a stop to that and redirect the converstaion to ethnicity. Don't forget that many in the media consider American exceptionalism and patriotism to be a bad thing.
In the Roman Empire, 'Africa' was pretty much only Tunisia, and Libya was already Libya, one of the few regions that still has the same name today. (Another is Syria.) The 'African' popes were very unlikely to have been black: they were most likely Berbers, though they may have had some Carthaginian (~Phoenician~Lebanese) and Greek blood. The Arabs, of course, were still in Arabia. (There was a slave trade across the Sahara, so there were some actual black Africans in the Roman empire, on both sides of the Mediterranean. Many are depicted in paintings and sculptures. Many were gladiators or soldiers or slaves, but some were free men and prosperous businessmen. But they were a very small percentage of the population, so probability is against any of the three African popes being black in the modern sense.)
By the way, who's the most famous 'African' in history, in the Roman sense of a pre-Arab-conquest North African? St. Augustine, after whom the Augustinian order is named, which is the Pope's order. I think he was a native Punic-speaker.
Most famous 'African'? St. Augustine, maybe. Hannibal? Moses?
This reminds me of the notion that Cleopatra was black--based on the fact that we know nothing about one of her grandmothers.
Or even better, the capsule description of some History Channel production about Alexander the Great, where he is billed as "Egypt's great warrior king."
Most famous 'African' as in Berber, not the Greek and Carthaginian colonists, or the Egyptians, is still probably Augustine, or maybe Apuleius. Yes, they spoke the Punic language, but were probably ethnically Berber, since they were from small towns that were only ruled by the Carthaginians.
AI overview : “The terms "criollo" and "creole" are related but not identical, stemming from the same origin but with different meanings depending on the context. "Criollo" is the Spanish word for "native" or "local," historically referring to individuals born in Spanish colonies but of Spanish descent, differentiating them from those born in Spain (Peninsulares). "Creole," in English, also means "native" or "local" but has broader implications, encompassing people born in a colonized area and often representing a mixed heritage.
In the Dominican 🇩🇴 “criollo” is very common denomination meant to distinguish between native fauna, for example, and the “gringo” brought in by boat. Often the “criollo” means it costs more and believed to be better quality, with a tinge of patriotism to buy criollo over the ‘foreign’ could mean to be patriotic.
Nice try at laying some deflective groundwork, but I'm reliably informed: That smoke identifies as "white".
He is American through and through. He didn't even go to Peru until he was 33, after serving in Chicago. He returned to Chicago regularly during his ministry in Peru, which lasted shy of ten years, after which he returned to Chicago. He was a member of the US Council of Bishops. He was then called to serve in a post in the Vatican, where they have walls. His job was to oversee the body that investigates/ shelters priests accused of sexual misconduct. It's a job he certainly got "training" in, in both Chicago and Peru. SNAP led with the Cardinals to pick virtually anyone but him. The big Peru schmear indicates his deep animosity towards American Catholics. He is a very divisive, inappropriately political choice. The Bernie Sanders of Popes is not going to create the kumbaya he claims.
Good clarification, Dr. W.
The free men of color who made up two militia battalions in New Orleans before the ACWABAWS offered their services to the Confederates and were rebuffed. They later went into Federal service.
The Confederacy, which wanted to expand into the Caribbean space (Gulf of the Southern Confederacy, anyone?) was an outlier when it came to black troops. Every country and empire in the region employed black soldiers and sailors and had done so for centuries.
SNAP pled, sorry
I wonder what the rest of the world will make of the American “one drop“ rule.
Wikipedia says Pope Bob is a citizen of the US and of Peru. Before he was Cardinal of Chicago, he was Bishop of Chiclayo. Will he be more Chicago or more Chiclayo?
Does it matter? In some American or western circles, the most American or western thing about someone is being anti-American or anti-western.
WA-Poo's recent headline refers to Prevost as a Peruvian American.
https://archive.is/MZPGv
He's of French, Italian, and Spanish descent. He is also not Peruvian and did not spend most of his religious career in Peru but in Chicago. The media lies are bold in this deceit.
So we have to ask why? Why these lies? What was he doing during his longer tenure in Chicago? With whom did he associate? Which boards did he sit on? With whom?
I guess to curry more of a Hispanic identity, yes those are questions that should be asked, he was a protege of Jadot from the start, he was on the progressive end of the thing
Everybody say a prayer for "Tina Trent".
She's got it bad...
He's of French, Italian, and Spanish descent. He is also not Peruvian and did not spend most of his religious career in Peru but in Chicago.
He's got no native Peruvian ancestry, but he does hold dual nationality in Peru.
Peruvian flake.
I’ve been waiting for one of the MAGA commenters here to accuse the new pope of being a DEI hire.
One came close in responding to Althouse’s White Smoke! Post, describing the pope’s hometown as “the most unfortunate corrupt DEI suburb of the now most unfortunate corrupt DEI city.”
Charlie Sykes did go there on X, “The election of Pope Leo XIV seems like a Dei hire.” Even that is a little weaselly.
In any case, Dei Pope doesn’t make a very good insult, it reads as Pope of God.
I had thought one of the early Popes was Black - possibly from Ethiopia or Nubia. I doubt if the African Popes were Black - most likely North African/Berber.
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