Pope Leo XIV: The Hidden Sicilian Roots of the First American Pope

When white smoke rose over St. Peter’s Square in May 2025 and Robert Francis Prevost stepped onto the loggia as Pope Leo XIV — the first pope ever born in the United States — the world’s genealogists turned at once to a single, stubborn question. Behind a French surname and a Chicago birth certificate, where did this American pope truly come from? The answer, hidden for a century beneath false names and half-erased documents, turned out to be one of the most tangled and profoundly human stories in the recent history of Italian emigration.

A French name that concealed an Italian man

Prevost is a French surname, and for a long time it pointed investigators away from Italy altogether. The pope’s father, Louis Marius Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1920; his birth certificate names his own father as a merchant “born in France” and his mother as a woman also “born in France.” An older brother’s 1917 certificate repeats the same French story — and contradicts itself at every turn, with erasures, a missing maternal age, and a paternal birth year that wanders between 1878 and 1887 from one document to the next. Even the children’s Italian-sounding middle names, Centi and Lanti, read less like baptismal names than like clumsy renderings of Santi. Something in this family did not want to be found.

The false trail to Piedmont

Accuracy is the whole point here, so this detour deserves to be told plainly. When the pope’s grandfather appeared as “Italian” in the 1950 census and on his 1960 death certificate, giving a birth date of 24 June 1876, the Italian press moved fast. A baptismal record surfaced for a Giovanni Pietro Felice Prevosto, born 24 June 1877 in Settimo Rottaro, in the Canavese near Turin — a region where the surname Prevosto is common and, fittingly, means “provost” or “priest.” For a few days, the pope was Piedmontese. Then researchers followed that record to its end: the Settimo Rottaro child had died before his first birthday. The matching date was a coincidence, and the Piedmont thesis collapsed.

The Sicilian schoolmaster

The real man emerged from a newspaper advertisement. In the Chicago Tribune of 6 May 1934, a language school offered lessons in French, Italian, German and Spanish under the name “Riggitano-Prevost.” Behind it stood Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano, born on 24 June 1876 in Milazzo, in the province of Messina, Sicily — the very birth date the death certificate had preserved. His own father was named Santi, the source of those puzzling middle names. Riggitano had crossed to New York in the summer of 1903 and made his living teaching Romance languages across the American Midwest — in Quincy, Keokuk, Galesburg and Fort Madison — a cultured immigrant moving from one conservatory to the next.

The Frenchwoman from Le Havre

The grandmother was French after all — but not the “Suzanne Fabre” of the birth certificates. Her true name was Suzanne Fontaine, born on 2 February 1894 in Le Havre, in Normandy. At twenty-one she boarded the liner La Touraine and reached New York on 13 March 1915, lodging at a Catholic home for young Frenchwomen far from her family. And her surname holds the last clue of all: “Prevost” was almost certainly the maiden name of Suzanne’s own mother — a French name the couple reached for when they needed one that would not betray them.

Two names, one secret

Why the disguise? The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required every non-citizen adult to register with the federal government, and it is there — in a single file signed under both “Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano” and “John Prevost” — that the two identities finally meet on one piece of paper. The reason for the secrecy was old and ordinary. Riggitano was already married, to Daisy Hughes, whom he had wed in Chicago in 1914. In March 1917 a Quincy newspaper aired the scandal, with Daisy naming a “Suzana Fountan” as the other woman. Suzanne fled to Toronto and, that July, gave birth to her first son far from home, under invented names for herself and for the man she loved. They stayed together; a second son, the pope’s father, arrived in 1920.

The proof, on two American forms. Click either to read it in full.

The seminarian’s grandson

There is one last detail in those old Illinois newspapers, and it is the one that lingers. Salvatore Riggitano, they wrote, had been “educated for the priesthood but was never able to take his vows.” A century later, in a family that had spent a lifetime concealing its own name, his grandson walked out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s as the Bishop of Rome. The vocation the grandfather could not complete came to rest, by a long and improbable road, on a boy from Chicago who might just as easily have been called Riggitano.

The documented line: from Milazzo to Rome

The paternal line does not dissolve into legend a single generation back. It is documented — civil record by parish register — all the way back into eighteenth-century Sicily. Salvatore’s father, Santo Riggitano, was a court usher at the Milazzo town hall, and the family had lived in that Sicilian port for generations before any of them crossed the Atlantic. Salvatore’s own birth act of 24 June 1876 and his father Santo’s of 19 July 1824 both survive in the Milazzo civil registers — this is the line the archives actually prove.

Beyond Giuseppe, the record reaches back further still. His own death act, drawn up in Milazzo in 1864, names his father as Santi Riggitano — the man buried at San Giacomo Apostolo in 1814 — so the paternal line stands documented, generation by generation, into the mid-eighteenth century. That recurring name, Santi, is the same one that would surface a hundred years later as the garbled middle names on two American birth certificates. Only the generations before Santi, reaching toward the early 1700s, still rest on parish reconstruction rather than on the civil registers.

The civil records of Milazzo behind this line. Five acts — birth, marriage and death, drawn from the town’s own registers between 1824 and 1876 — anchor every name above. Click any document to enlarge it.

This reconstruction rests on the collaborative documentary work of the Geneanet community and independent researchers, cross-checked against United States census records, Ellis Island passenger lists, the 1917 draft registration and the 1940 Alien Registration files, and the civil records of Milazzo. The identification of Salvatore Riggitano with “John R. Prevost” rests not on one decisive act but on a convergence: an identical birth date of 24 June 1876, two language schools that merge into a single name, the 1917 scandal, and an alien file signed under both identities. That convergence is strong — and we present it as documented reconstruction rather than a notarized equivalence. That distinction is the honest line between a compelling case and a closed one.

Sources and acknowledgements

The identification of Pope Leo XIV’s paternal grandfather — the discovery that a Sicilian named Salvatore Riggitano lived his American life under the borrowed name of “John Prevost” — was established through the collaborative work of the Geneanet community, the researchers of the Genealogy Discord Server, and the volunteers of the Centro di Genealogia, and first published by Geneanet in May 2025. That breakthrough is theirs, and this article builds on it.

What this account adds is the primary-source layer: the original civil registers of Milazzo — the birth, marriage and death acts of the Riggitano family, held by the Archivio di Stato di Messina — consulted, verified and reproduced here to anchor each generation to the document that proves it, and to trace the paternal line, act by act, back into eighteenth-century Sicily.

The full case study — “One Man, Two Identities: How Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano Lived His Life as John R. Prevost” — is published by the researchers themselves at discordgenealogy.com/research-findings, where the Prevost brick wall was broken in May 2025. Further reading: Le origini italiane del Papa Leone XIV finalmente svelate (Geneanet) · Family of Pope Leo XIV (Wikipedia).

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