Just when you thought the world couldn’t get any weirder, you find out the newly elected Pope Leo XIV is reportedly related to Madonna. And Justin Bieber. And Angelina Jolie. And, sure, Hillary Clinton. The man’s lineage reads like a fever dream of pop culture trivia and a holy family reunion none of us saw coming.
The discovery comes from a New York Times Magazine deep dive by Henry Louis Gates Jr., host ofFinding Your Roots, in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. Together, they traced the pontiff’s ancestry back more than 15 generations.
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While the article highlights everything from enslaved ancestors and Spanish nobility to scandalous affairs and free women of color, the part that lit up the internet focused on one 17th-century Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpré, who apparently makes the pope distantly related to an entire gaggle of A-listers.
That includes the Material Girl herself, whose long, messy history with the Catholic Church makes this family connection feel like divine camp. (This is the woman, after all, who once asked Pope Francis to “meet up one day to discuss some important matters,” noting she’d been “excommunicated three times.”)
Also on the list is Justin Bieber, who’s been increasingly vocal about his faith, albeit through a slightly different brand of worship than his cousin in the Vatican.
In total, the pope has dozens of famous cousins, including Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, and Jack Kerouac. According to the report, they’re all connected through the kind of tangled colonial migration patterns that remind us how small and strange the world really is.
While some Catholic traditionalists might not know what to make of a pope whose relatives have sung “Like a Prayer” and starred in Spring Breakers, others are already declaring him the People’s Pontiff.
Hey, at least he’s not happy with the current administration, so at least we have that to celebrate.
