Of European and Creole roots: how is the multicultural family of the new Pope Leo XIV

Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was anointed as Pope on Thursday, is the first leader of the Catholic Church born in the United States, but his family history is diverse and multicultural.

The bishop, who will exercise his pontificate under the name of Leo XIV, was born in Chicago in 1955, son of a couple of Americans with foreign roots.

The new pontiff has two older brothers, Louis Martin and John Joseph.

Prevost maintains a very close relationship with Peru, a country whose citizenship adopted after living there for three decades and where he did most of his pastoral career.

In his first speech as Pope, he even dedicated a few words in Spanish for the Peruvian people: “A particular greeting to my dear Diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru, where a faithful people have accompanied his bishop, has shared his faith and has given so much, so much, to continue being the faithful church of Jesus Christ,” he said as Leo XIV.

In BBC Mundo we review the family history of Robert Francis Prevost.

His father, who died in 1997, was Louis Marius Prevost, who was born in the United States from a marriage originally from France. Hence his French name.

He was a member of the United States Navy and participated in World War II. Then he formed a family in the Delton neighborhood, in the suburbs of Chicago, where he served as a school superintendent.

His mother, Mildred Agnes Martínez, who, when married, adopted the Prevost surname, was born in Chicago, where he attended the Depaul university, which is the largest Catholic Higher Education Institution in the US.

Done to 1990, Mildred was the daughter of Joseph Martínez, who according to his marriage certificate was identified as born in the Dominican Republic, but lived in the state of Louisiana. There he married Louise Baquié, a woman of Creole or Creole origin, an ethnic group with an ethnic mixture predominantly French-African-Caribeña very present in the south of the United States.

When referring to the family origin of Leo XIV, the newspaper The New York Times He pointed out in an article that “descends from New Orleans Color Creoles,” according to the documentation that genealogists have recovered about the new Pope’s maternal family.

The new Pope is the youngest of the three children of marriage.

The eldest is Louis Martin, who lives in Florida. It is followed by John Joseph, who continues to live in the Chicago area.

In various interviews, the brothers have told that their younger brother went to study an Augustinian school since he left high school. Then he went to a university in Pennsylvania, so from an early age they only saw him on vacation.

His vocation was seen as a child, according to Louis Martin: “I used to play with guns, knives, arches and arrows. And he played to be a priest.

“No … Can I give you communion?” He replied.

His brother John Joseph told NBC Chicago that his parents only came to see him officiated as a priest, because they died long before he became Bishop (2015) and Cardinal (2023). Knowing that it would be Pope would have put them “extremely proud.”

“They visited him in the missions in Peru. And they were very impressed with what he was doing there,” he said.

When asked about whether older brothers gave him advice, he said that “he is usually the other way around, he gives us advice to us. But if he gave one, he would be ‘know himself’, because that is what he did.”

The truth, John Joseph jokes, is that Rob will not stop saying. “I’m not going to call it potato. Or maybe sarcastic.

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