Amna Nawaz
@PBSNewsHour·5.3M subscribers·62.2K videos
WATCH: Pope Leo's family tree includes pop stars and politicians
Posted
August 21, 2025
Views
26,263
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879
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August 21, 2025
26,263
879
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2:36Now PlayingFans of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots” will recognize the setup: a massive family tree spread out on a table, with Henry Louis Gates Jr. ready to explore the branches of someone’s lineage they never knew they had. But this was a holy different experience. This was the pope.
Gates met with Pope Leo XIV in July at the Vatican after the Harvard professor and PBS host published insights into his ancestry in The New York Times Magazine. The family tree for the man born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955 reveals Latin American freedom fighters, Canadian nobility, enslaved ancestors and slave-holding ancestors and ties to two major pop stars, among other notable celebrities.
“I have done a lot of family trees in my time,” Gates told PBS News. “There are very few people who have a more diverse family tree or a family tree as extensive [as Leo]."
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