Scandal, slavery and celebrity are all part of Pope Leo XIV’s ancestry

Pope Leo XIV is a man of the cloth, and some of the ancestral threads woven to make the world’s first U.S. and Chicago pope are stained in blood, scandal — and even glitter with celebrity.

The Dolton-born pontiff’s roots have been under a microscope ever since his election to head the Catholic Church May 8, but perhaps no one has offered a sharper focus than Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing in the latest edition of The New York Times Magazine. Gates has hosted a celebrity genealogy show on PBS called “Finding Your Roots” since 2012.

Working with genealogists at American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, Gates and his team traced the new pope’s ancestors back to Spain of the 1500s, on his mother’s side.

Some of the more interesting findings:

* Four of his “11th-great-grandfathers” are listed as “hidalgos” or minor nobility.

* Several of the pope’s relatives were men of war. One, Diego de Arana Valladar, was a sea and land captain who spent years fighting Dutch “privateers” trying to take over Portugal’s colonial holdings in America.

* The pope’s paternal Sicily-born grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano Alito, made newspaper headlines in Illinois, when he apparently had an extra-marital affair and his wife called the police to have Alito and his lover arrested. The lover, not the wife, is listed on the pope’s ancestral tree, according to the magazine piece.

* The pope, through a Canadian ancestor, is distantly related to Justin Trudeau, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie and the writer Jack Kerouac, among others.

* Seventeen of the pope’s U.S. ancestors were Black.

* At least four of the pope’s white ancestors owned slaves in the United States; one fourth-great-grandfather, Francois Lemelle, enslaved at least 20 people, according to the magazine. Several of the pope’s Black ancestors were also slaveholders.

* The single largest shares of the pope’s identified ancestors come from France (40), followed by Italy (24), the United States (22) and Spain (21).

Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories centers on Alito, the pope’s paternal grandfather, born in Sicily in 1876. He likely immigrated to the U.S. in 1905, according to the magazine.

He apparently split his time between Chicago and Quincy, where he taught music and romance languages.

“He was dapper and polished and made many friends, quickly becoming a favorite,” according to a 1917 newspaper clipping, which appears to be from Quincy.

His home life was apparently less harmonious. The clipping said Alito’s wife, Daisy, successfully sought a warrant for the arrest of her husband and a woman she claimed had been “mixed up improperly” with her husband.

Alito was at one point studying to become a priest, but eventually felt as though he could not take the vows, the news clipping states.

Professor Michael P. Murphy, director of Loyola University Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, has studied papal history for decades.

“It’s astonishing and consoling to know finally how interconnected we are,” Murphy said, adding, “Most of us are interconnected in this very refreshing way, which should engender peace, understanding, good will. And to have the pope be so integrated that way makes me smile.”

People shouldn’t be appalled by some of the unsavory behavior stretching back hundreds of years?

“It’s so unfortunate, but if you’re a Catholic and if you’re the pope, the reality is that humans are prone to sin,” Murphy said. “Anthropologically, … we are a complex of opposites. We are realists here. Note to self: Don’t be a person who enslaves people; that is not justifiable. But to find out that that reality takes place in families — we can’t be surprised. The important part is what we do with that.”