On Friday, Chambers was among Black Bostonians to react with warmth and pride to the revelation that the new pope is a descendant of Creole people of color.
Chambers, who is a parishioner at St. Katharine Drexel in Dorchester, said the pope appears to be a man of humility and worldliness, someone who cares about justice and someone who wants people to care about one another. He was elated when he heard about the pope’s lineage, saying it was “a matter of pride.”
“It’s going to be a matter of healing pride because there‘s been some tough times, politically,” he said. “We’re living in tough times.”
Multiple outlets, including The New York Times, reported this week that the maternal grandparents of Leo XIV were described as people of color in historical documents.
The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, lived in New Orleans and eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother, according to the Times.
In Boston, the genealogical discovery of Leo XIV, which is the name the new pope chose, was broadly welcomed.
M. Shawn Copeland, a professor emerita at Boston College’s department of theology, said, “Such a discovery ought not to be surprising to anyone in the Americas.”
“Nearly all of us are racially and culturally mixed; sadly, we either do not know our interwoven roots or sometimes choose to ignore and forget them,” she said.
Copeland said as “an African American, a practicing Roman Catholic, and a professional theologian, this discovery of the pope’s background strikes a chord of joy and pride.”
“Yet what is most important is that Leo XIV already has extended himself to all human persons, especially those whom our society marginalizes and demeans,” she said. “The pope forcefully reminded the world of God’s unconditional love for all of us, for humanity, and he assured us that ‘evil will not prevail.’”
State Senator Lydia Edwards, a Black Democrat from East Boston and practicing Catholic, said Black Catholics in the US are often overlooked and considered by some within the American Black community to be “an anomaly.”
“He couldn’t be more American than to have come from that particular ancestry in the United States,” said Edwards.
About 6 percent of Black adults in the US are Catholic, the Pew Research Center reported in 2022. Among adult American Catholics, only 4 percent are Black.
Edwards noted that the pope’s family did not identify as Black while he was growing up and that the pope would not have the same lived experience as someone who identified as Black.
But still, for her, Leo XIV is technically the first “African American pope.”
“It’s beautiful to see and I wish him well,” Edwards said.
She added, “He is probably related to some people in Louisiana who are Black. That’s a big deal that you are related to pope.”
Boston resident Lorna DesRoses, a multicultural ministry consultant at the Archdiocese of Boston, said the pope’s roots speak to the history of the US, and the hardships faced by people of color.
DesRoses learned of the pontiff’s lineage through social media, where she said it spread quickly through local Black Catholic and Haitian threads. (The National Catholic Reporter this week reported that a grandfather of the pope, Joseph Martinez, was born in Haiti.) She said there was a time when it was not unusual for someone with Creole roots to move north and not acknowledge their roots, especially if they were white-passing.
“It’s a complicated history,” she said.
Creoles, also known as “Creole people of color,” have a history almost as old as Louisiana, the Times reported this week. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent who were born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color, according to that newspaper.
DesRoses, who is of Haitian descent, called the pope’s heritage “a blessing for the church.”
“This is historic,” she said. “It’s a historic moment in the life of the church, in the life of this country.”
Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, who is the first Haitian American to lead the city’s legislative body, said the pope’s heritage is “deeply meaningful for lots of different communities.”
“There’s a lot to be proud of here,” she said.
The news comes at a particularly painful time for Haitians living in Greater Boston, as bloody civil strife and unrest continues in Haiti, said Louijeune, who is not Catholic but whose father is.
Given so much ongoing suffering there, the pope’s connection to the island nation “is pretty uplifting,” she said.
Material from Globe wire services was used in this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.
