Pope Leo XIV has revealed that his family history includes both enslaved people and slaveowners, speaking publicly for the first time about his ancestry in an interview with NBC Nightly News.
“On my mother’s side, we have people who were both slaves and slave owners,” Pope Leo told NBC anchor Tom Llamas.
He continued: “There’s a history of, if you will, growing up in the kind of experience that helps me to recognize myself, one of the greatest wealths of the United States.”
According to NBC Nightly News, this is the first time Pope Leo has publicly acknowledged his family’s connection to slavery on camera.
The Pope also said he has a “great love for America” and hopes to visit his home country within the next few years.
He told NBC Nightly News that he appreciates “what America stands for, the sense of freedom, the sense of opportunity, the sense of having invited, for generations, people from around the world to be part of America”.
Pope Leo’s family history reflects that diversity.
In 2025, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor at Harvard University and presenter of the genealogy series Finding Your Roots, wrote in The New York Times that Pope Leo has “one of the most diverse family trees we have ever created”.
Born in the Chicago suburb of Dolton, Illinois, Pope Leo’s ancestry reflects the city's long history as a destination for Catholic immigrant communities. His father, Louis Marius Prevost, was the son of French and Italian immigrants and served in the United States Navy during the D-Day landings. His mother, Mildred Agnes Prevost (née Martínez), was born in Chicago to a Louisiana Creole family that had moved there from New Orleans.
Louisiana Creoles are an ethnic community whose ancestry includes French, Spanish, African – both free and enslaved – Native American and other mixed-heritage peoples.
Gates wrote that Pope Leo’s maternal grandparents were identified in historical records as “mulatto”, a historical term once used to describe people of mixed Black and white ancestry, and as “Black”.
“The pope’s ancestors have many intersections with the institution of slavery,” Gates wrote.
According to Gates’s research, both Pope Leo’s Black and white ancestors owned enslaved people, including some who had themselves previously been enslaved.
“We identified four white ancestors who owned slaves in the United States,” Gates wrote, adding that there were likely additional slaveowners in the Pope’s ancestry because many of his maternal forebears lived in Cuba, where slavery was also practised. Gates also identified eight Black ancestors who owned enslaved people, writing that they “were known to have enslaved, in total, at least 40 other people of color”.
Slavery in the United States was formally abolished with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution on December 6, 1865.
