The Pope, the one-drop rule, and the ghosts of New Orleans
The white smoke had barely cleared from the Vatican chimney when a genealogical tremor made its way across the Atlantic. Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, formerly a Chicago-born cardinal of modest demeanor and impeccably Roman collar, had become the 267th successor to Saint Peter. And as it turns out, perhaps also the first Pope whom American racial taxonomy—had it been consulted—might once have classified as Black.
Within hours, some of the commentariat swarmed: not with doctrinal questions, nor with the politics of papal succession, but with the question of blood. Or, more precisely, of drops of blood. Pope Leo’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Norval Martinez, was born in Haiti and later migrated to New Orleans, where he married into a Creole family. Census records, ever the blunt tools of social engineering, once designated the pair as “Black” or “Mulatto”—labels whose meanings shifted with the political winds and the prejudices of the time. By the time the family reached Chicago, however, those same records called them “White.” Thus, a racial transmigration occurred not unlike the spiritual one the Pope is said to have undergone: from margin to center, from periphery to throne.
But what, exactly, is race to an institution that has long concerned itself with the eternal soul? And what does it mean for America—land of the one-drop rule, birthplace of racial essentialism in its most bureaucratically precise form—that the most powerful religious office on Earth is now occupied by a man whose ancestry would once have barred him from a country club, or worse?
In the United States, we know our ghosts by the files they left behind. Paper trails of racial arithmetic—”quadroon,” “octoroon,” “colored”—stalk our archives like ancestral wraiths. The logic of hypodescent (assigning mixed-race individuals to the subordinate group) was not merely a social custom but the underpinning of legal regimes. “Any discernible trace” of African ancestry, whether visible or not, was enough to render one Black in the eyes of the law and thus subject to its degradations. In essence, American racial classifications are legal fictions and social constructs, born of economic exploitation, white supremacy, and political expediency, not objective or scientific truth. The boundaries of “Black” and “white” have been shaped by the interests of those in power—especially white elites—seeking to divide labor, maintain control, and limit rights. For decades, racial classification was enforced through a combination of state statutes and court rulings. In the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), for example Homer Plessy, who was “7/8 white,” challenged Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act, which required separate railway cars for white and Black passengers, but the Supreme Court upheld that he was Black under the Louisiana statutes and upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” It remains one of the most infamous rulings in American legal history, as it gave legal sanction to decades of racial segregation and systemic inequality—especially in the South. Also, Racial Integrity Acts (e.g., Virginia 1924) Prohibited interracial marriage and forced individuals to identify as either “white” or “colored.” These laws were championed by eugenicists, such as Walter Plecker, who enforced strict racial boundaries.
Against this grim arithmetic, Pope Leo’s family history reads like a case study in racial fluidity—though not by choice. They passed. Or rather, they were reclassified. What had once been a marker of subordination may have become invisible, perhaps even irrelevant, in the upwardly mobile Catholic enclaves of the Midwest. But if America buried that ancestry in a census box checked “White,” it was New Orleans that remembered it. There, in a city long accustomed to paradox—where Catholic saints and Voodoo spirits jostle for altar space, and where Creole identity has always defied easy categorization—the news of the Pope’s roots set off quiet jubilation. The Seventh Ward, where Pope Leo’s grandparents lived, is a historically rich area of New Orleans, often overlooked in mainstream narratives. Discovering his roots there highlights the area’s importance in the city’s cultural and religious landscape and connects the Pope to the often-overlooked history of Black Catholics in the United States. This is seen as a moment of recognition and pride within the Black Catholic community
It’s as if the Holy Ghost returned to Tremé, the birthplace of jazz, invoking both ecclesiastical and ancestral spirits. The New Orleans press has not asked whether the pope is “really” Black, or whether Haitian descent “counts” for purposes of historical milestone-making. Instead, they claim him as kin, in the way that a city claims its trumpet players and its culinary geniuses: with pride, ambiguity, and a certain musical disregard for paperwork.
But the American mind is less forgiving, and more forensic. The Pope’s case reopens a sort of spectral anthropology. Op-eds now can argue whether “Creole” is Black enough. Scholars can debate whether ancestry can constitute identity without lived experience. And lurking behind it all is that uniquely American obsession: the taxonomy of difference, the ledger of bloodlines.
To be sure, Pope Leo XIV has made no public comment on the matter. Perhaps, as the Vicar of Christ, he considers his lineage to run through the Apostles rather than Ellis Island. Or perhaps, as a man of deep humility, he understands that racial classification is a uniquely terrestrial torment, one that the Kingdom of Heaven wisely declines to enforce.
Still, there is something poetic—magical, even—about the sight of a man born of Haitian and Creole grandparents now occupying the throne of Saint Peter, clad in robes whose gold embroidery was once justified with scriptural arguments for racial hierarchy. It is not justice, exactly, but it is irony. And irony, as the Lord well knows, is often the beginning of wisdom.
In the end, the Pope’s racial identity—whether Black, white, or unclassifiable—is not for bureaucrats or theologians to decide. It is, like faith itself, an act of interpretation. And perhaps that is the final lesson for America: that the categories we cling to, that we litigate, that we inscribe on birth certificates and gravestones, are but shadows cast by a history we have not yet learned to forgive.
