Pope Leo XIV may have ties to Quebec through maternal lineage: researchers

Quebec researchers say it’s very probable Pope Leo XIV has a connection to the province.

“We found at first three, now I think four or five lineages that have potential connections to Quebec,” said Luc Baronian, an associate professor of linguistics at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.

Robert Francis Prevost may be an American from Chicago, but there may be more to his lineage.

“Almost everybody who knows anything about Quebec or genealogy started thinking, well, maybe that Prevost line is from Quebec. Turns out it isn’t. His grandparents came from Europe. But when I looked into it, I realized that his mom’s parents were Louisiana Creoles. And immediately I thought, well, there must be some connection there to Quebec.”

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Baronian says he, along with his genealogist colleague Pierre Gendreau-Hétu of the Université de Montréal, uncovered there are between three and five possible candidates in the pope’s lineage

“The lineage that we find is most promising right now is the Boucher lineage,” Baronian said. “That’s the same Boucher of the Boucherville town south of Montreal. And it was a famous settler, Boucher de Boucherville. And one of his descendants ended up in Louisiana. And it seems that he is one of the ancestors of the pope.”

Based on records of the maternal side of Pope Leo XIV, U.S. genealogists found he has Black and Creole roots from New Orleans in the 1840s.

Baronian previously studied dialects between Louisiana French, Creole and its connections to Quebec at Stanford University. While researching in the early 2000s, he said what stood out was how some of the people who spoke French didn’t have Acadian accents. He says he was hearing certain words and certain pronunciations that were heard primarily in Quebec — crediting his theory.

“This is a beautiful connection that we get today where, yes, we do have a pope with Quebecois ancestry, but he doesn’t have just Quebecois ancestry. He has a mix of French, of African ancestry, of the Caribbean and Spanish ancestry and so on,” Baronian told CityNews.

The researchers say they still have to prove this possible Quebec connection with original public records, as a DNA test seems unlikely.

“Then you come back to the original idea that maybe he does have a link to Quebec,” the associate professor said. “It’s a fun, satisfying loop to come back to what originally struck me as probable.”