Harvard professor who traced Leo XIV’s genealogy meets with Pope

July 08, 2025

Pope Leo XIV received Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in a July 5 audience.

Gates, who hosts the PBS television series Finding Your Roots, traced Pope Leo’s family history back 500 years. Gates said in an interview:

Of the over 100 ancestors that we found, 17 are Black. But the most ancestors are from France—41; Italy, 24—and by the way, both Sicily and Milano—Spain, 21; USA, 21, including those 17 Black people, nine from Cuba, six from Canada, one from Haiti and one from Guadalupe ...

What’s interesting is that we found—not surprisingly, for a person from the South—we found that 12 of his ancestors owned slaves. But here’s the punchline. Of those 12, four were white and eight were Black ... I think that he’s—symbolically, he’s the perfect pope because his very genome expresses the history of the world over the last 500 years.

 

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Further information:

• Audiences, 05.07.2025 (Vatican Press Office)
• We Traced Pope Leo XIV's Ancestry Back 500 Years (The New York Times)
• The search into Pope Leo's family roots (NPR)