Pope Leo’s family secret: a birth in a mother and baby home

A lone and fleeing scandal, a 23-year-old gave birth in a Catholic mother and baby home close to the US border with Canada in the summer of 1917.

She named her little boy “Jean” and chose “Prevost” for his surname: the maiden name of the mother she had left behind in her native France two years earlier, when she boarded a ship from Le Havre to New York.

That decision, at the Our Lady of Victory Infant Home in Lackawanna, reverberated down the decades, ultimately determining the surname of her grandson, Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV .

“To the best of our knowledge, the pope’s grandparents were never married,” said Sean Daly, a US-French genealogist with France’s family history website Geneanet, whose name reflects his own Irish roots.