The proof that the lines of Pope Leo XIV of origin of Chicago reflect the legacy of immigration of the United States – and a complicated relationship with the race – continued to emerge since he recently became the first American ever chosen to direct the Roman Catholic Church.
The ancestry of the family history service recently announced that a team led by the main genealogist Kyle Betit had determined the paternal grandfather of Leo, John R Prevost, immigrated to the United States in northeast of Sicily.
This revelation came while Leo used his first address to world diplomats on Friday to say that the dignity of migrants must be respected. Some have interpreted the remarks as indicating that Leo could be prepared to compete with the policies of the White House of Donald Trump generally seeking to repress immigration to the United States.
“My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate,” Leo told Vatican ambassadors.
The information on the Sicilian roots of Leon made surface in part on a form in 1940 that Prévoste – Living in Chicago at the time – was to fill up because he was a foreign national and had not become a naturalized American citizen.
The form, as well as other relevant genealogical documents, indicated that Prevost was born on June 24, 1876 in Milazzo, a province of Messina, Italy, and named Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano. The document alluded when he arrived in New York on the Pérugia steamship in May 1903, one of the 4 million Italians – most of the Sicilians like Riggitano – who immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1915 in the hope of fleeing poverty, the political upheaval as well as other difficulties, showed the ancestor’s search.
Riggitano finally adopted John as his first name, anglicizing the one who gave him birth, and took the family name of his wife, Suzanne Prevost, like hers. He taught Italian, French and Spanish. Finally, he lived in Chicago with his wife and family, according to his curriculum vitae, his newspaper articles and his advertisements, his birthday files and his census information, which were all consulted by the ancestry based in UTAH.
Betit said that one of the sons of the Prévosts, Louis Marius, finally married Midred Agnes Martinez.
The father of Mildred, Joseph, was clearly born on the island containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. And for a while, Joseph lived with Mildred’s mother, Louise, in the seventh district of New Orleans, a bastion in the city for Creole people, a term used there to describe those of mixed race, according to other genealogists.
Les Martinezes – The maternal grandparents of the future pontiff – at a given moment identified as black. But in 1920, when racial oppression was endemic and often violent in the southern United States (and not yet deemed unconstitutional by the country’s Federal Supreme Court), the Martinezes had moved north in Chicago. And, like other families similarly located in the United States, they have changed their racial identity in white.
Louis and Mildred Prevost raised three sons in the Catholic faith in Chicago, the youngest of which was Robert. Robert Prevost was ordained a priest in 1982; has become the world leader in the Catholic Religious Order familiar known as the Augustins; directed a Peruvian diocese; was made cardinal by Pope Francis in September 2023; And directed the Vatican entity responsible for selecting new bishops around the world.
On May 8, after a two-day conclave in Rome, about 460 miles from the Italian homeland of his paternal grandfather, Leo was elected to succeed François at the head of the world’s Catholic church and his 1.4 billion members.
“We often see parallels between the past and the present,” said Betit in a statement. “In the case of the new pope, his grandfather traveled from Italy to America, and (his) travel brought him back to Italy as a pope.”
His predecessor frequently clashed on the subject of immigration with Trump, who won a second American presidency in November largely by promising to carry out mass deportations.
The first months of Trump’s second presidential term were marked by regular news of detention and moves related to immigration to the United States. In fact, Friday, his administration aroused a decision of the Supreme Court rejecting his efforts to resume the deportation of the Venezuelans under a law in wartime of the 18th century.
As a cardinal, Robert Prevost, for his part, had gone to social networks before becoming a pope and republished an opinion chronicle criticizing an affirmation of JD Vance, the vice-president of Trump, that taking care of his own people before turning to others was consistent with the teachings of Catholicism.
And, during his speech on Friday at the Vatican at the ambassadors, he said: “We all, during our lives, can find ourselves in good health or sick, employees or unemployed, living in our native country or in a foreign country, but our dignity is still unchanged. It is the dignity of a desire and loved by God. “
Vance was to direct a delegation of American officials to the inaugural mass of Leo on Sunday.
