Popes of African or melanated origin previously emerged at moments of superpower decline. The canny papal conclave that elected Leo XIV may have followed historical precedent.
By Chudi Okoye
Holy Smoke! We have a Pope of color!
A dark horse of Black ancestry, with less than 1% odds in the betting markets, became the 267th Catholic Pope on May 8, 2025, winning by what seems like a landslide.
The white plumes billowing from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney on Day 2 of the recent papal conclave heralded the swift election of a new pontiff, following the passing of Pope Francis (2013 to 2025). The title chosen by the new Vicar of Christ, “Leo XIV,” immediately tickled the imagination of many on both sides of the ideological divide, some – with fright or delight – conjuring the onset of another progressive papacy. Yet title alone offers little ideological clue, with the legacies of previous Popes named “Leo” far from uniform.
Thirteen pontiffs had taken that title since the 5th century, prior to the incumbent. Some were outstanding, among them Leo I (St. Leo the Great), who sat on the Throne of St. Peter from 440 to 461 AD. He was one of the most influential Latin Church Fathers, ranking alongside Saints Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great. Others, such as Leo V, Leo VI, Leo VII, and Leo XI, were weak and quickly forgotten.
The papal Leos have spanned the ideological spectrum, although most leaned moderate to ultra-conservative rather than progressive. Leo XII, who reigned from 1823 to 1829, was staunchly conservative and hostile to liberal ideas. His successor, Leo XIII, who led the Church from 1878 to 1903, was more moderate and, in some respects, progressive. He supported workers’ rights, championed social justice, and encouraged dialogue with science by promoting St. Thomas’s synthesis of faith and reason. It is Leo XIII’s legacy that has set ideological tongues wagging, with some on the left instinctively cheering the election of Leo XIV, while their opponents on the right jeered.
In the rush to decode the political signals, however, many may have missed what might be a more startling historical echo in the ascension of Leo XIV. The Chicago-born Pope, who is of Black Creole descent and Augustinian Order, has ascended at a time some view as the beginning – or even acceleration – of America’s imperial decline, just as, over eighteen centuries ago, another Pope of African descent – Victor I – emerged amid the early signs of Rome’s fading glory. Two Popes of color, elected at moments of imperial pallor.
Of course, the concept of “color” in Victor’s time was not understood the way it is today. Roman Africa was a hodgepodge of identities, and the Church’s universality often transcended ethnic lines. Yet the symbolism remains striking: in both eras, the papacy turned to leaders literally or symbolically from the periphery as the old order began to fray. Whether this has been the Holy Spirit at work or a sign of the conclave’s worldly shrewdness, it is a reminder that the Church’s story is always entwined with the fate of the world around it.
Popes of Color
As a poised and placid Pope Leo XIV stepped onto the celebrated balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on May 8, waves of excitement rippled through the faithful flock gathered beneath in the square and thence around the world. This was partly due to the expeditious papal election. But I attributed it as well to the symbolic heft of the new Pope’s chosen name, and to his being the first American-born Pope. But a different kind of excitement began to form moments later as descriptions of the new pontiff’s ancestry unfurled, and folks focused more closely on his complexion.
Holy smoke! The new Papa – sovereign of the Vatican City State – is melanated, clearly dark-skinned. As we were soon to learn, he is of Creole ancestry.
A person of color! A kind of brotha (or “broda,” in my Igbo pidgin).
It had happened before, mind you, the first time over eighteen centuries ago when another man of African descent – Victor I – ascended to St. Peter’s perch. Even more striking: the geopolitical context at the time of that melanated papal ascension resembles ours today.
Leo XIV was born Robert Francis Prevost on September 14, 1955, at a hospital in the heavily Black-inflected South Side of Chicago, Illinois, where he was also raised. He was born to a French-Italian father, Louis Marius Prevost, a Chicago native, and a Spanish mother, Mildred Agnes (née Martínez) Prevost, also born in Chicago. Though from Chicago, Leo’s ancestral line extends south, deep into Louisiana’s Creole past. His forebears were descendants of free people of color who navigated a liminal world between enslavement and privilege under French and Spanish colonial regimes. Leo must have felt the subliminal influences of those worlds. His maternal grandparents, Joseph Martínez and Louise Baquié, were identified as Black or ‘mulatto’ in early 20th-century U.S. Census records. They resided in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, a neighborhood known for its vibrant Creole culture and population of free colored people. His grandfather, Joseph Martínez, a cigar maker, was born in Haiti, while his grandmother, Louise Baquié, hailed from New Orleans. Their daughter, Mildred Agnes – Pope Leo XIV’s mother – was born in Chicago following the family’s relocation there between 1910 and 1912.
That complex heritage – racially mixed, socially hybrid, culturally resilient – firmly situates Pope Leo XIV within a lineage of African and Caribbean descent, marking him as the first pontiff with verified African American ancestry. It also infuses the new Pope’s biography with quiet defiance. His American birthplace may suggest assimilation, but his lineage carries the deeper narrative of survival and syncretism at the edge of society. The revelation of Leo’s Creole roots has been met with pride and celebration, particularly in New Orleans, where local communities have embraced him as “the 7th Ward Pope.”
Leo is also, fittingly, a Pope of two passports. After joining the Augustinian Order in 1977, Prevost spent over two decades in Peru, becoming a naturalized citizen, leading the local Augustinian mission, and later serving as bishop and apostolic administrator in Chiclayo, a city in Peru. His ministry among the poor and indigenous of Latin America shaped a pastoral approach marked by humility, intercultural dialogue, and a quietly radical fidelity to those on the margins of society. That experience was not incidental. It formed the moral spine of a man now tasked with shepherding a global Church under intense ideological strain.
Moreover, he is the first member of the Augustinian Order to become Pope – an order named after the African bishop and towering Church Father, Augustine of Hippo. In that sense, Leo XIV not only revives the papal line of African descent but also draws symbolically from a theological tradition that is rooted in the continent’s ancient precepts of harmony and community, emphasizes education and rigorous scholarship, and at the same time embraces a deep commitment to the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable.
From Hippo in modern-day Algeria to Chicago, to Peru, to Rome, Leo XIV’s election binds together disparate geographies into a coherent and, perhaps, providential arc.
To sketch out the African nexus in Leo’s lineage is also to invoke the deep provenance of African Christianity. As I argued in an earlier essay, Africa was there at the very inception of the faith, Christianity taking root on the continent as early as the first century AD. Mark the Evangelist is believed to have established the church in Alexandria around 50 AD, only 17 years after the death of Jesus and contemporaneous with Paul’s missionary journeys across Asia Minor and Greece.
Biblical accounts also underscore Africa’s place in the Gospel narrative. Jesus’ family is said to have fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath, and some scholars suggest that the so-called “missing years” of Jesus – the approximately eighteen-year gap between his childhood and the beginning of his public ministry – may have been spent in Africa. Simon of Cyrene, a man from modern-day Libya, was compelled to carry Christ’s cross; and the Ethiopian eunuch, an official in the court of Queen Candace, stands among the earliest recorded converts to Christianity.
By the 4th century, Christianity had become the state religion of the Axumite Empire, in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea – long before it gained dominance across most of Europe. European missionaries and colonial regimes would only later spread the religion to sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet Africa was not merely an early adopter of Christianity; it was instrumental in shaping its doctrine. African theologians helped lay the intellectual foundation of the faith, with contributions that continue to resonate. Tertullian coined the term “Trinity” and defended orthodoxy against heresies. Origen systematized Christian theology through his groundbreaking work in biblical exegesis. And Augustine, whose synthesis of Roman philosophy and Christian thought still undergirds much of Western Christianity, remains one of the most influential figures in Church history.
As Africa helped forge Christian doctrine, it also began to shape the Church’s leadership – most strikingly in the figure of Pope Victor I, a Berber likely from Leptis Magna in modern-day Libya and the first pontiff of African origin.
Victor’s rise to the papacy around 189 AD came during one of the most tumultuous periods in Roman imperial history. Though still vast and outwardly stable, the empire was beginning to fracture under the weight of deepening dysfunction. Commodus, son of the illustrious Marcus Aurelius, steered Rome from his father’s stoic discipline into decadent misrule. His assassination in 192 triggered intense power struggles, culminating in the tumult of 193 – the Year of the Five Emperors, an annus horribilis of colliding ambitions, betrayal, and bloodshed.
In rapid succession, Pertinax was hailed emperor early that year but was murdered less than three months later by the Praetorian Guard. Didius Julianus bought the throne in an auction and was killed after just two months. That same year, Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus also seized power, though neither was officially recognized as emperor. Amid this chaos emerged Septimius Severus, a shrewd and battle-hardened general also from Leptis Magna, who became Rome’s first non-European emperor. He would go on to stabilize the empire until 211, well after Victor’s papacy ended in 199.
The overlapping ascent of Victor and Severus – two African-born figures leading Church and Empire – implies a fascinating precedent of African authority at the heart of Roman power during a time of imperial upheaval.
While Severus strove to stabilize the restless realm, Victor – assertive and unafraid – became the first bishop of Rome to challenge far-flung churches in a bid to impose unified authority. This came to a head during the so-called Quartodeciman Controversy, when he sought to establish a uniform date for Easter. He overreached in the process, attempting to excommunicate Eastern bishops who dissented, but was restrained by peers like Irenaeus of Lyons. Yet his effort marked a bold new conception of papal primacy: a centralizing force amid institutional fragmentation. Victor’s actions anticipated the future papacy, one capable of shaping, even imposing, theological order across a geographically dispersed and doctrinally unsettled communion.
Victor was not an isolated African presence in the papacy. He was followed by Miltiades (311–314) and Gelasius I (492–496), both of Berber descent. The timeline means that within a 300-year span, bracketed by the end of the Pax Romana (c. 200 AD) and the fall of the Western Empire (in 476 AD), Africa had produced three pontiffs who helped to steer the Church through imperial turbulence.
St Miltiades was Pope when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, ending Christian persecution. St Gelasius I became the first pontiff to be called the Vicar of Christ (Vicarius Christi). Together, they embodied the paradox of Rome’s universality: a city that ruled an empire, yet was increasingly shaped by its margins. So too today, the modern papacy looks to the Global South not merely for numbers, but for its moral and spiritual guidance.
Just as the Church today wrestles with pressures from its global periphery (African, Asian, Latin American), so too did the early Church, operating in the shadows of pagan Rome. The Church was doctrinally unsettled and politically precarious, yet it was kindled by insurgent energy from its provinces, including North Africa which had become a spiritual and intellectual hotbed for early Christianity. From that African crucible emerged thinkers like Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine, who forged the intellectual framework for early Christianity. And from that same ferment arose pontiffs of African origin – Victor, Miltiades, and Gelasius – offering the Church stable and centralizing leadership in turbulent times.
Leo XIV inherits a deeply troubled Church, belied by the excitement of his election. He steps into an era of institutional crisis and historic unraveling. The Church is beset by doctrinal rifts, deepening disaffection from both progressives and traditionalists, sexual scandals, declining clerical credibility, and mounting tensions between the metropolitan center and the global periphery. Beyond these internal strains, the Church confronts the decay of Pax Americana: long underway but hastened under Donald Trump’s second presidency which is marked by moral slippage, unbridled corruption, rising global distrust, assaults on immigrants and liberal institutions, economic volatility, and creeping authoritarianism. As Catholic unity frays and geopolitical certainties dissolve, Leo must restore coherence without retreating into reaction, perhaps even offering a countervailing force to American decline.
If he can steady the Church through this storm – renewing its mission and reaffirming its moral voice – his legacy may rival not only that of Leo XIII, his reformist namesake, but also his African papal forebears, who once held firm as empire fell. As a cradle Catholic and former altar boy, I’m rooting for him, and praying he rises to meet the moment.
