NEW ORLEANS (RNS and NPR) — Despite being born in Chicago and living most of his adult life in Peru, the first American pope has been claimed by Black Catholics in the Big Easy, who are welcoming him as family and dubbing him “Pope Leo of the 7th Ward.”
“We call him our cousin,” said Dorothy Pierce as she left Mass at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in the Treme neighborhood on a recent May Sunday, just over two weeks after Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected as the 267th pontiff in Rome.
Gabrielle Edgerson said she thinks the pope’s brothers look like her father’s side of the family, and she joked that they may actually be cousins. Philip Soublet, too, said he was wondering if he was related to the pope. They’d all heard the news that broke shortly after his election, that Pope Leo XIV has Creole roots in New Orleans that stretch back centuries.
“You know how we all, we just claim everything from here,” Soublet said.
Even on a group text for young Black priests, one started digging and thought he, too, may be among Leo’s newly discovered family, said the Rev. Ajani Gibson, pastor at St. Peter Claver.
“The pope doesn’t know anything about this,” Gibson said, laughing. “But the number of cousins that the pope has all of a sudden …