A Century-Old Romance That Gave the Pope His Family Name

New York Times

16-05-2025

The more that Americans learn about Pope Leo XIV and all his complex, diverse family history, the more they see themselves.
One set of genealogists uncovered that on his mother's side of the family, Pope Leo descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans, a discovery that thrilled residents of that city who felt a connection to the first American pope.
Now, another story on a different side of the pope's family has emerged. Genealogists have found that his paternal grandparents in Chicago were once accused of a charge that might seem prudish now: A century before Robert Prevost became the pope, his grandparents were arrested for 'unbecoming conduct,' a story that was breathlessly covered in the gossipy, sensationalist newspapers of the late 1910s.
The press called it 'an illicit affair' that had morphed into a love triangle. Newspaper articles and other public records show that the pope's grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano, was married to another woman while accused of having a relationship with Suzanne Fontaine, who later became the pope's grandmother. Mr. Riggitano and Ms. Fontaine would eventually take the surname Prevost from Ms. Fontaine's mother, starting a new family whose lineage now leads directly to Vatican City.
The story of Pope Leo's grandparents, European immigrants who found love and a brush with the law in Chicago, is incomplete and somewhat murky. But public records give a glimpse into what happened, beginning in their home countries of Italy and France, and eventually tracing to the pope, who will be formally installed as pontiff in Rome on Sunday.
A group of online genealogists, the Genealogy Discord, released a report on Thursday revealing the background of the pope's grandparents and how their names and lives shifted over time.
Mr. Riggitano was born June 24, 1876, in Sicily, Italy, records show. He moved to the United States soon after the turn of the 20th century and became a teacher, described in newspapers as a highly educated man with an unusually sharp intellect who taught music and languages.
Mr. Riggitano taught Spanish for a time at a high school in Quincy, Ill., then a small town of 35,000 people on the Mississippi River about 300 miles southwest of Chicago. He also worked in Chicago, newspapers reported.
'For two winters in Chicago he has been engaged as a teacher by the 'Lovers of Italy,' a fashionable club which studies the Italian language, art and history, and which is composed of many of the wealthiest and most prominent women in Chicago,' the Quincy Journal reported in 1908.
In 1914, Mr. Riggitano, then 37, married a woman named Daisy Hughes in Chicago.
But by March 1917, the Quincy Daily Herald had turned to covering another aspect of Mr. Riggitano's life. 'Riggitano in Triangle,' the headline read.
According to the article, Mr. Riggitano and Ms. Fontaine were arrested at the prompting of Ms. Hughes, who had reported to the police that he was inappropriately entangled with Ms. Fontaine.
'Both declare innocence of the charge made against them by the wife of Riggitano and that it is all merely a case of jealousy that has no reason for existence,' the Quincy Daily Herald reported on March 26, 1917.
By then, Mr. Riggitano and Ms. Hughes were living apart.
Online genealogists said on Thursday that Ms. Fontaine, who is sometimes identified in records as Ms. Fabre or Ms. Fountan, then went to Canada, later Detroit and eventually Lackawanna, N.Y., where she gave birth on July 23, 1917, to a boy she named John Centi Prevost — using her mother's family name.
That boy would eventually become the pope's uncle. Ms. Fontaine and Mr. Riggitano would also take the surname Prevost, and Mr. Riggitano would adopt the Americanized version of his middle name, John. Ms. Fontaine returned to Chicago and in 1920 had another baby boy, Louis Prevost, the father of Pope Leo.
It was not clear from available records whether Mr. Riggitano divorced Ms. Hughes, or whether he and Ms. Fontaine married.
But a death notice in 1960 made clear that the union was deep and lasting. The notice for John Prevost, formerly Mr. Riggitano, called him a 'devoted husband of Suzanne,' a loving father of John C. and Louis M. and a grandfather of three.
The death notice for Mrs. Prevost, formerly Ms. Fontaine, in 1979 notes that she died in a hospital in Detroit at the age of 83, and that she was a member of the Third Order of Carmelites, a Roman Catholic religious order of laypeople.
She was a 'fond grandmother of Louis, John and Robert Prevost,' the notice said.