Imagine that you discovered, all in one day, that you are pope and that you are Black. Does God have a sense of humor, or what? I think that’s what happened to Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. His grandparents were Black New Orleanians until they moved to Chicago around 1910 and became White.
Two parts of the family were ripped apart by the pernicious, ridiculous concept of race and all the political, social and cultural assumptions that came with it in the early 1900s. That ridiculousness and many of those assumptions are still with us. Now, more than a century later, this family is reuniting, curious about each other and celebrating their common ancestry.
So yes, God has a sense of humor as a way of getting our attention. But the purpose of the lesson is reconciliation…