This is like a reward from God,” a local parishioner said, as researchers unearthed more details about the lives of Leo XIV’s ancestors in the heart of the city’s Afro-Caribbean culture.

The new pope’s French-sounding last name, Prevost, intrigued Jari Honora, a New Orleans genealogist, who began digging in the archives and discovered the pope had deep roots in the Big Easy. All four of Pope Leo XIV’s maternal great-grandparents were “free people of color” in Louisiana based on 19th-century census records,

When Father Tony Ricard watched the new pope deliver his first address to the faithful Thursday in St. Peter’s Square, he felt an instant kinship.