Passing and the Papacy
Passing, Papacy, and the Price of Silence: Pope Leo XIV and the American Story Beneath the Robes
In the hushed grandeur of the Vatican, when Pope Leo XIV stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, few in the crowd knew the fuller, hidden story behind the new pontiff. Born Robert Francis Prevost on Chicago’s South Side, his rise to the papacy is historic for many reasons—his American roots, his missionary service in Peru, his Augustinian leadership. But another story clings silently to the hem of his robe: the story of racial passing, of ancestors once listed as Black, then later as white. It is a story of migration, erasure, survival, and unspoken truths—an American story, a Creole story, a Black story (Washington Post, 2025).
Pope Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, were born into New Orleans’ storied Creole community—a world shaped by Catholicism, French heritage, music, and Black autonomy. The Seventh Ward was home to many gens de couleur libres—free people of color who, despite systemic racism, carved out a vibrant middle-class existence (Gehman, 1994). Joseph, a cigarmaker possibly born in Haiti or the Dominican Republic, was recorded as Black in the 1900 New Orleans census. But after the family relocated to Chicago, likely as part of the Great Migration, federal records listed them as white (Religion News Service, 2025). The silence was strategic.
This shift in identity was not accidental. It was racial passing—a survival tactic in a country where the one-drop rule determined not only who was Black, but who was barred from full participation in society. For Creole families like the Prevosts, who often had lighter skin, passing was a door out of the caste. But it was also an act of sacrifice: language lost, culture hidden, Blackness buried to escape American apartheid.
When the family arrived in Chicago, the city was experiencing both a Black cultural renaissance and violent backlash. The 1919 race riot had left dozens dead and hundreds injured, sparked when a Black teenager drifted into a “white” beach on Lake Michigan. The violence was not isolated—it marked a broader effort to enforce racial boundaries through fear (Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1922). Housing covenants, job discrimination, and police repression made Chicago a city of both promise and peril for Black families (Massey & Denton, 1993). To pass as white in this climate was not simply about privilege—it was often about survival.
By the time Pope Leo XIV was born, his maternal African ancestry was not denied—it was simply never mentioned (Axios, 2025).
The impact of passing is not merely personal—it is psychological and generational. In Black Like Me, journalist John Howard Griffin, a white man, chemically darkens his skin to live temporarily as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. What he uncovers is not only the violence and dehumanization directed at Black people, but the devastating effects of being unseen. “All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” he writes (Griffin, 1961, p. 42). For those who passed permanently, like the Prevosts, the transformation was real and irreversible. It wasn’t just a change in how others saw them—it was a suppression of how they could see themselves.
Consider Walter White, a high-ranking NAACP executive in the early 20th century. Born in Georgia to parents of mixed race, White had blond hair and blue eyes, yet eight of his great-grandparents had been enslaved. He could have lived as white and walked away from the struggle. Instead, he chose to live as a Black man, leading investigations into lynchings and risking death to expose injustice (White, 1948). His life was the inverse of passing: a reclamation of ancestry at great personal cost. Pope Leo XIV’s ancestors made a different choice—one many families made—opting for safety in a society that punished authenticity.
Yet in an unexpected way, their sacrifice set the stage for a global moral leader whose actions now echo their legacy.
During his years in Peru, Robert Prevost served the poor not from a place of pity, but of proximity. He traveled by horseback into remote ravines, preached among the forgotten, and spoke out against state-sponsored violence during the Fujimori era. When death squads like the Colina Group committed atrocities in the name of order, he condemned them—loudly (The Tablet, 2023). When President Alberto Fujimori was granted a politically motivated pardon, Prevost insisted on justice, accountability, and apology (Reuters, 2017). The descendant of a family that once chose silence chose, instead, to speak.
This evolution—from hidden ancestry to public moral witness—should not be viewed as contradiction but as continuity. The choice to pass was always about survival in a system built to kill or degrade Blackness. The choice to confront injustice abroad became a spiritual and ethical inheritance of that same lineage. What the Prevost family could not say in 1920, Pope Leo XIV declared in his deeds in 1995: every life, regardless of caste, matters.
Today, as the world examines his papacy, many wonder whether Pope Leo XIV will address the full scope of his racial heritage. But perhaps that’s not the point. His life already does. His story holds the same dual tension many African American families have carried for generations: between visibility and vulnerability, between survival and authenticity. And in that space—the quiet chasm between what we live and what we reveal—lies the true power of passing. Not as betrayal, but as blueprint.
His election brings back into view a kind of American Catholicism long hidden in plain sight: the Black Catholic tradition. A tradition that includes jazz masses in New Orleans, the activism of Daniel Rudd, the wisdom of Sr. Thea Bowman, and the unspoken multitudes whose rosaries were clutched in segregated pews. Pope Leo XIV, knowingly or not, embodies that tradition and extends its global reach.
The moral arc of his story bends through the experience of the Great Migration, through Creole silence and Chicago assimilation, through Peruvian struggle and ecclesiastical ascension. In his body are the echoes of those who chose invisibility for their children’s safety—and those who, like Walter White, chose danger for their children’s dignity. Pope Leo’s life is a confluence of both.
The Church has long celebrated miracles of healing, of sudden grace. But sometimes, the most sacred restoration comes not from above, but from memory—from confronting the scaffolding of race, power, and silence passed down through generations. Pope Leo XIV, perhaps without ever naming it directly, brings that history full circle.
References (APA Style)
Axios. (2025, May 9). Pope Leo XIV’s Creole roots and the Great Migration. https://www.axios.com
Chicago Commission on Race Relations. (1922). The Negro in Chicago: A study of race relations and a race riot. University of Chicago Press.
Gehman, M. (1994). The Free People of Color of New Orleans: An Introduction. Louisiana Cultural Vistas.
Griffin, J. H. (1961). Black Like Me. Houghton Mifflin.
Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard University Press.
Religion News Service. (2025, May 9). Pope Leo XIV’s ancestry and the erasure of Black Catholic identity. https://religionnews.com
Reuters. (2017, Dec 26). Peruvian bishop opposes pardon of Alberto Fujimori. https://reuters.com
The Tablet. (2023). Cardinal Robert Prevost’s human rights record in Peru. https://thetablet.org
Washington Post. (2025, May 9). Pope Leo XIV’s family tree shows Black roots in New Orleans. https://washingtonpost.com
White, W. (1948). A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White. Viking Press.