My cousin*, the pope

Boston Globe

22-05-2025

But they weren't buried alone. Other members of their extended family were also interred there and memorialized on the gravestone. Any doubt I had about the veracity of the pope's Creole heritage evaporated when I read my last name at the bottom of that gravestone.
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The headstone of the Pope's grandparents' grave at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Courtesy of Jari Honora
Growing up with a last name as unique as Sorapuru — or 'Soraparu,' as it's spelled on the gravestone — my family always told me that if someone else shared it, we're probably related.
So I immediately thought:
Is Pope Leo my cousin?
The answer, which I'll get back to, involves a winding tale mixed up in the muddiness of race. But first, some context.
In modern popular culture, the word 'Creole' has become shorthand to signify someone of mixed African and European heritage, usually with ancestral roots in Louisiana. But the term did not originate as a racial designation, said
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To understand how
'Creole' became synonymous with race, we have to examine
Louisiana's pre-American history as a French, and later a Spanish, Catholic colony.
Compared with English American colonies, there was 'a toleration and a recognition that there is this mixing that's happening,' said
Many mixed-race people were designated
were permitted to seek things that were mostly denied to enslaved people like education, paid employment, property ownership — including that of other human beings — and legal protections.
The French and Spanish developed more
laissez-faire attitudes toward racial mixing in comparison with the English for two reasons, Peacock said: The colony's survival depended on it, and Catholic doctrine, which functioned both as religion and law, dictated that all people, regardless of race, had souls.
Although Louisiana functioned as a 'tripartite' society, free mixed race people were still 'a quandary,' said
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After examining dozens of public records, mostly from the 19th century, I've discovered my ancestry is filled with people who lived in this liminal space between fully realized humanity and complete dehumanization. But that space slowly started to shrink after the Louisiana territory was sold to the United States in 1803. In the ensuing decades, as Americanization set in and the state transformed, so, too, did its racial ideas.
As the country grappled with the fallout of the Civil War, including the emancipation of enslaved people, 'white people became very, very stringent about the question of race,' said
Newly empowered to vote, Black people obtained unprecedented political power in Louisiana by way of public office during the 12-year Reconstruction period after the war. It was during this era, in 1875, that Joseph Paul Adolphe Sorapuru — my relative who is buried with the pope's maternal grandparents — was born in Louisiana.
Joseph, who went by
Paul, is my first cousin four times removed. In other words, Paul's grandfather, Lorenzo Adolphe Sorapuru Sr., is my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
The earliest record I found of Paul —
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The Sorapuru family home in St. John The Baptist Parish, Louisiana has been in the family since the mid-1800s.
Courtesy of the National Parks Service
But young Paul and his family would not be permitted to identify as such for much longer.
Shortly after Union troops ended their occupation of Louisiana, former Confederates and their children reclaimed political power in the state and 'promptly decided that they would institute a binary racial system,' Morlas Shannon said.
So Creoles of color were left with a choice: attempt to disappear into whiteness and the privilege it grants, or fully embrace their Blackness and the marginalization that accompanies it.
By 1900, Paul and his family had moved 40 miles downriver to New Orleans' Seventh Ward, the cradle of the city's Black Creole population. However,
by
then, Paul, his mother, and his younger siblings
Eight years later, 32-year-old Paul
married
22-year-old Agnes Martinez, also a Creole of color living in the Seventh Ward, in the Catholic church.
The 1908 marriage certificate of Paul Sorapuru and Agnes Martinez from St. Katherine's Church on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans.
Archdiocese of New Orleans
Sometime between 1908 and 1917, Paul and Agnes moved north to Illinois. Records seem to suggest Agnes's parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez, and her aunt and uncle, Joseph and Louise Martinez (the pope's maternal grandparents), also made the migration around this time. Leo's mother, Mildred, was born in Chicago in 1911. Agnes Sorapuru is listed as Mildred's godmother on the younger cousin's
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According to 1920 census documents, the Sorapuru and Martinez families — all marked as white — lived fairly close to each other in Chicago. It also appears
Paul and Agnes lived with her parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez,
Fair-skinned Black people leaving their hometown only to reemerge elsewhere living as a white person is
For many, it was an act of economic, social, and personal survival, Gaudin said, not an expression of anti-Blackness. They 'made a decision that racism is harmful, it can harm me and it can harm my children,' said Gaudin, who wrote
But that privilege came at a cost. Passing usually meant 'breaking the ties of family,' Peacock said, because the discovery of African ancestry 'could harm your opportunities.'
By passing, Paul and the Martinezes cemented their collective identity shift from Black Creoles living in Jim Crow New Orleans to a family of white Catholics in cosmopolitan Chicago. The latter narrative is the one Leo and his brothers seemingly grew up on.
John Prevost, the middle brother who is two years older than the pope, recently
told the New York Times he and his siblings
'It was never an issue,' the Times quoted him saying.
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The pope and his siblings never met Paul Sorapuru. He died in 1948, a few years before the oldest Prevost brother, Louis, was born. Agnes outlived her husband by 20 years. The couple, according to surviving records, never had children of their own.
Paul's marriage into the Martinez family connected the branches of Leo's family tree to my own. But the decision to move to Chicago and pass created a branching moment that separated us from them.
My direct ancestors who stayed in Louisiana were shaped by their Black Creole identity. Growing up, we called our godparents by Louisiana French
titles: Parrain and Nana or Nanny, short for Nénènn. My First Communion photos are still on display in my childhood home nearly 20 years later. My paternal grandmother, both parents, and my older sister are all proud graduates of the only historically Black Catholic university in the country, Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.
Julian Sorapuru's great grandfather Clarence Sorapuru.
The Sorapuru Family
Despite their racial change, one thing the pope's ancestors retained from New Orleans was their Catholic faith. It was one of the few identity markers from their old lives that was safe for them to hold onto.
Our fascination with Leo's Creole heritage shows how important race remains to our perceptions of people in America.
So far, he has not publicly acknowledged his African ancestry, but if he does, it would be
more meaningful than a
simple appeasing gesture.
'When people envision American Catholicism, they think of Boston, they think of New York,' said
In Black communities, especially Catholic ones, from Chicago to Haiti
Honora warned that racial identity is difficult to categorize. 'People like to quantify race, and that is really impossible to do, even with the popular genetic tests,' he said. 'Nobody can say, 'You're precisely 22 percent Black or white,' because these things are social constructs.'
Mark Roudané relates to the pope's situation better than most.
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The Sorapuru-Martinez family tree
Is reporter Julian E.J. Sorapuru related to Pope Leo XIV? It's complicated.
Ryan Huddle/Globe staff
In 2006, at 55 years old, Roudané was going through the belongings of his recently deceased father when he came across a binder. Inside were ancestral photos and documents that revealed Roudané, who was raised white, had
'My heritage reappeared from this historical fog,' said Roudané, who currently runs
For Leo, Roudané said, there is an opportunity to use his platform as a world leader to make a difference about how we understand racial identity.
'I think the best thing that could happen from all of this new stuff that has come to light with the pope's ancestry is that he, and we, begin to really take a much more sophisticated look at what it means to be a human being,' Roudané said, 'what it means to be Black, what it means to be white, what it means to be mixed race.'
So is the pope my 'cousin'? Technically, no. My family member, Paul,
is related to Pope Leo XIV by marriage, not by blood.
But in
Black communities across America, family is largely defined by bonds, not by blood alone. The ties between our two families may have been severed a century ago — by migration, by circumstance, by racism — but the revelation of the pope's hidden heritage offers us a path toward reconciliation.
Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at