Black, Catholic and Gen Z: In searching for my roots, I found Pope Leo in my past
What does it mean to be a member of Gen Z and a Black person of Catholic faith living in the United States at this moment of history? In searching for the answer, I discovered I belonged to a past that helps me make sense of my present.
I grew up in a Baptist and Catholic household in Seattle. My parents always instilled in me the importance of prayer and keeping my eyes on God. I remember in my early childhood singing in the children’s choir of Peoples Institutional Baptist Church in Seattle. Because I was baptized Catholic, my dad wanted me to become more in touch with my Catholic faith. As I got older, my family began attending Catholic Mass at St. Therese Parish in Seattle, where I received my first Communion.
Every Sunday my dad would drive me, my mom and my grandparents to Mass. After Mass, we would always go to one of our favorite brunch spots nearby. Now that both of my paternal grandparents have passed, those memories are ones I hold close to my heart. This habit of going to Sunday Mass, praying as a family and sharing a meal afterward always helped me to start my week on a positive note. I would leave church reminded of God’s love and faithfulness. I would be reminded that God walks with me wherever I go.
But as I got older, the happy memories of faith collided with a world that invited doubt. Watching the racial reckoning in the United States in the past decade, including the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016 and the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, I began to grapple with the question: What does it mean to be a Black person of Catholic Christian faith while watching your people fight for the recognition that their lives matter? During the 2016 election cycle, I vividly remember politicians who used racist language when talking about communities of color. I also noticed that there were Christians who supported these same politicians. I remember feeling confused and angry because these words contradicted the word of God that I had learned growing up.
During this time, I also began taking note of African American voices of faith from the past, some of them new voices for me and some as close as my own family. First I was drawn to the story of the 272 enslaved Africans who were sold in 1838 by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus. Many of the 272 were sold to cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana, where my ancestors were living at the time. What thoughts and feelings did my ancestors have when they baptized their children into Catholicism while their people were treated as commodities by other Catholics? I began to think more about my ancestors’ journeys as both Black and Catholic.
Not only did they live as Black Catholics in mid-19th-century Louisiana, but they passed down their Catholic faith through generations in the years that followed, during Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the present. Reflecting on ancestral lineage is a central part of African American culture. So I decided to trace back my ancestry to the 18th century, because this was the era when my ancestors were enslaved. My search for my Black and Christian roots would begin there. During my research, I talked with family members and relevant experts.
Family of Origin
My Louisiana Catholic ancestry begins with two names, Marie Jeanne Davion and François Lemelle. I first discovered these names by reading a profile written about my grandfather, Clayton Pitre, who served as a Marine in a segregated unit during World War II. Then I confirmed that my family origins go back to these names by searching in genealogical, census and sacramental records, as well as relevant histories. Marie Jeanne was an enslaved woman. François Lemelle was a plantation owner who had six children with Marie Jeanne. According to an article in St. Charles’ Parish Virtual Museum, titled “The Role of Slaves and Free People of Color in the History of St. Charles Parish,” the Lemelle plantation may have originally been in St. Charles Parish even before François Lemelle “moved both his white family and the family of color west to the Opelousas frontier” around 1770.
After François died, his will acknowledged his relationship and six children with Marie Jeanne Davion. He also freed her from enslavement. She received 800 acres of land and began a new life in Bayou Courtableau. One of her children was Francois Denato Lemelle, my fourth-great-grandfather. Then, Francois Denato Lemelle became the father to Leo Alexander Lemelle. Leo Alexander’s son, Victorin Lemelle, was my great-great-grandfather, who was born around the year 1850. Based on the census records, it is likely he was also born in the city of Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish. In the 1880 census, he was listed as a blacksmith.
I was able to find a baptismal record for Victorin’s daughter Eugenie Lemelle, my great-grandmother. This record was written in French and was difficult to read because of the age of the paper. However, I could discern that she was born in 1890 and baptized at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Chataignier, La. The Lemelle side of my family lived for generations in Louisiana. Their ethnic roots are in France and Africa, with the African lineage through Marie Jeanne Davion’s bloodline. Along this journey of discovering my people, my uncle told me that because of the 800 acres of land that Marie Jeanne Davion had inherited, the Lemelle family was quite successful and well educated.
These are the people I come from. I found myself gaining strength and inspiration just by learning their names, because these are the people in my family through whom faith has been passed down from generation to generation.
While searching for these names, I thought about how my own name fits within the legacy of my ancestors. Gabrielle Pitre is an example of French, Creole and Catholic lineage. Pitre comes from my French Creole ancestry. My parents decided to name me Gabrielle after the Archangel Gabriel, which means “God is my strength” in Hebrew. In Christianity, Gabriel is most known for telling Mary that she is favored by God and will give birth to Jesus. Another important point that resonates with me about Mary is that she wasn’t wealthy, but was an ordinary person chosen by God to give birth to our savior, Jesus Christ. Mary is an example of what it means to have faith in God’s plan even when it is unclear. When I think about my name now, I feel the comfort and presence of my ancestors’ guidance, prayers and footsteps wherever I go.
Of Laws and Liberties
Researching my family’s Black Catholic identity has also meant understanding the political context for free and enslaved Black people in the time of my ancestors’ lives. Their faith didn’t exist apart from this world but within it. There was a series of legal codes they had to navigate along with changing laws due to shifts in political control of Louisiana from the colonial era to statehood and Civil War, to Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I began this journey with Francois Lemelle and Marie Jeanne Davion in mid- to late-18th century Louisiana. During their lifetimes, political control over Louisiana changed dramatically from French to Spanish and back to French before becoming a U.S. territory and then eventually an American state. Laws that dictated liberties and restrictions for persons of color changed along with these changing political contexts.
Even though interracial marriage was illegal, there was racial mixing under French rule. As a result, a meticulous way of labeling racial status was used based on the percentage of African blood a person had. A biracial person who had a Black parent and a white parent was called a “mulatto.” And if a biracial person had a child with a white person, that child would be considered a “quadroon,” referring to one-quarter of African American ancestry. In fact, some of my ancestors were listed in various documents as “Negro,” “White,” “Mulatto,” and/or “Quadroon.” Marie Jeanne Davion was listed in records by the historian Donald J. Hébert as a “quadroon.” Because my great-grandfather Gilbert Pitre was biracial, he was listed in some census documents as “negro,” in others as “mulatto”; I also found a World War I military record that listed him as “white.”
The French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, and Louisiana officially became a U.S. state in 1812. According to the article, “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana,” published in 1966 in the journal Louisiana History, around 1830 many white Americans began to fear that free persons of color would build coalitions with abolitionists, which they feared would hinder what they saw as the economic growth brought about by the institution of slavery. As a result, legal status was often determined by race-based distinctions. This led to an increase in restrictive and oppressive laws for African Americans, including laws pertaining to free persons of color like my ancestors. These legal structures deeply affected their lives.
Sometimes the pervasive coercion of these legal structures exploded into murderous violence. One such occasion of extreme violence affected my great-great-grandfather, Victorin Lemelle. My ancestors lived in Opelousas since the early 19th century. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era in Louisiana had its benefits and drawbacks. However, whatever triumphs in politics there may have been were met with backlash from white Americans. In 1868 Louisiana revised its Constitution to allow African American men the right to vote (the 15th Amendment in the United States Constitution was in the process of being ratified). However, “former Confederates seeking to regain power and restore white supremacy in the state opposed these provisions…. The desire to keep Black people oppressed after emancipation was especially strong in Opelousas, the seat of St. Landry Parish.”
St. Landry Parish was also home to white supremacist groups. Approximately 3,000 white men were members of the Seymour Knights—a branch of the white supremacist Knights of the White Camelia (similar to the Ku Klux Klan). During the election of 1868, white residents of Opelousas physically attacked Emerson Bently, a white journalist who had exposed local voter intimidation. Because of the threat of violence, many Black residents of Opelousas armed themselves. Nevertheless, according to the Equal Justice Initiative (a nonprofit that provides legal representation to those who have been denied fair trials): “Over the next two weeks, armed white men patrolled Opelousas and surrounding communities, terrorizing and killing Black residents indiscriminately. By some estimates, the violence killed at least 30 white people—including some who were targeted by mobs for being sympathetic to Black rights—and left an estimated 200 Black people dead.”
A New Family Connection
As I researched the Opelousas Massacre at my desk in my bedroom, I teared up at the realization that my great-great-grandfather, Victorin Lemelle, would have been 18 years old and likely lived in or near Opelousas during this time. I wondered what it was like to be an 18-year-old Black male in 1868 when your people were being murdered because they were in the process of claiming their rights as citizens of the United States. I wondered what he thought and felt. How did this impact his faith journey and his sense of self?
I wondered what stories my ancestors shared with their families and the others they kept to themselves to protect their children from their pain. What were their conversations with God like in the midst of the mass murders and segregation they faced throughout their lives?
I wanted to learn more about the upsetting history of the relationship between the Catholic Church and enslavement to understand my ancestors’ lives and experiences as Black Catholics. So I turned to the discussion of the slow, frustrating change in Catholic teaching on slavery presented in John T. Noonan Jr.’s book A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. Mr. Noonan, who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, told the story of how the Catholic Church finally and officially came to decide that slavery is inherently wrong—but not until Dec. 7, 1965, in a document of the Second Vatican Council.
During the long, hesitant journey to this conclusion, several things struck me as key moments. In the late 18th century, Judge Noonan notes, various political leaders and philosophers reconciled the institution of slavery with the Enlightenment. He notes that “James Madison, the enlightened Christian who became the effective champion of religious liberty, was a slaveowner contented to leave the institution as he found it. ‘Enlightenment’ alone did not equate with abolitionism.” In the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII called out slavery’s cruelty but hesitated to call it inherently wrong. As late as 1960, the Italian Jesuit Tommaso Iorio described slavery as “a state of perpetual subjection in which one is bound to furnish all his work to another in exchange for support” but also denied that slavery was against the law of nature.
While reading this part of Judge Noonan’s reflections on Catholic moral teaching on “the law of nature,” several questions came to mind. I wondered how Catholicism could retain for so long distorted ideas of nature that led to the justification of enslavement. Who determines what is or is not against “the law of nature?” What makes something against the law of nature? And why for so long was slavery not considered against the law of nature? Judge Noonan lists all the aspects of slavery that were not condemned as morally wrong by the teaching office of the Catholic Church until 1965:
The offenses to human dignity that the church did not condemn included the buying, selling, hypothecating, inheriting, and owning of human beings; the use of slave labor without any measure of just compensation; the denial to slaves of education, including instruction in reading and writing, and the denial to slaves of the right to educate their children; the denial to slaves of any right to a religious vocation or to the sacrament of holy orders; the denial of any right to personal development; and the complete exclusion of the slave from the political community.
As a young Black Catholic, reading about how long it took for the church to condemn slavery, I felt disappointed and frustrated that the reluctance to admit fault took precedence over doing what was right. I wondered what my ancestors thought and felt about this reluctance. How did they reconcile their faith identity and racial identity as Black Catholics during a time when the Catholic Church was reluctant to call slavery inherently wrong?
As I retraced my ancestors’ journeys navigating their racial and Catholic identities in an anti-Black society, I found myself in awe of their strength and perseverance in the midst of racial terror and violence. I remember the day I received the baptismal records of my ancestors. I was sitting at the kitchen table back home in Seattle during spring break and got an email notification on my phone from the Diocese of Lafayette. Flooded with excitement, I rushed to my bedroom to grab my computer and open my email. I had never seen a baptismal record before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, my great-grandparents’ baptismal records were written in French, even though Louisiana was already a U.S. state at the time and English was its official language.
To see these records was powerful because they were tangible evidence of my relatives’ faith-based strength. Growing up, I had always heard stories of my Black, Catholic and French-speaking heritage, and to be able to hold these documents brought this heritage and my ancestors to life. Oftentimes we are pressured by society to separate our racial identity from our faith identity. However, this process has shown me that both can coexist and create a beautiful and unique experience. Through these baptismal records, I am convinced that my ancestors’ faith was essential to their survival during the frightening times they lived through as Black Americans and French colonial subjects.
While thinking about my ancestors’ journey, I wondered how they would have felt about the election of Pope Leo XIV. Not only is Pope Leo XIV the first pope from the United States, he is also a pope with a Louisiana Creole heritage similar to my family’s. I wonder about the sense of pride and excitement they would have had that the leader of the Catholic Church is a descendant of people who survived the same history of discrimination and racial terror that my ancestors faced while remaining rooted in their faith.
In June 2025 a New York Times article with the blurb “Noblemen, enslaved people, freedom fighters, slaveholders: what the complex family tree of the first American pontiff reveals” analyzed Pope Leo’s Creole ancestry and named some of his ancestors, which revealed one more very important family connection for me. In the article, the distinguished author Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote, “Another fourth-great-grandmother of the pope, Marie Jeanne, was an enslaved ‘mulata,’ counted among the property of François Lemelle, of New Orleans.”
If this is the case, it means I share ancestry with Pope Leo XIV through my great-grandmother Eugenie Lemelle’s paternal lineage going back to where I started the story of my ancestry in this piece—Marie Jeanne Davion. My very, very, distant cousin is the pope! I am absolutely ecstatic and in awe of this discovery.
This journey has reaffirmed my trust in God’s faithfulness and guidance. Going forward, when I feel discouraged or worried, I will draw inspiration from my ancestors and how they held on to God’s unchanging hand during times of great uncertainty. In our world today, when news headlines become even more troubling and life feels uncertain, I will remember how my ancestors went through worse times of racial unrest, and how they put their best foot forward to survive knowing that God would see them through their hardships. Knowing what they faced gives me strength to persevere in my Catholic faith now.
This article appears in February 2026.
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