About the time that Pope Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents left a Creole neighborhood of New Orleans for Chicago more than a century ago, the bishop of Portland died having overseen the diocese for a quarter of a century. One thing they had in common was a deep Catholic faith.

The other was a secret: by the racial standards of the time, they were Black.

It says something about America that today we can celebrate rather than hide the reality that the first pope born and raised in the United States has a mixed racial heritage.

Pope Leo may not be a “Black pope,” as the National Catholic Reporter and other publications have said, but he is not a white pope, either. He is part of that swirling melting pot of America, where a French-speaking couple of African descent could take a long train ride from the Jim Crow South and emerge on the other end as white people.

Bishop James Healy, who guided the Portland diocese from 1875 until 1900, made a more circuitous journey but with the same endpoint: he passed as a white man.

Nobody recognized Healy’s heritage in his day. His roots didn’t become public until, half a century after his death, when a biographer dug up the facts.

Pope Leo apparently knew nothing of his own Creole background until a genealogist in New Orleans disclosed them soon after the College of Cardinals elevated him to the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church last week.

In Healy’s case, that even a highly regarded bishop once felt the need to pass for white is an indication of how much skin color mattered to generations long gone. Granted, it’s not as though we are past all of that today. There are still many Americans who see African Americans as lesser Americans.

Charles Nero, a Bates College professor who has studied the issue, told me that the church was at the center of community life for the Black Catholics of New Orleans in the Seventh Ward. That Catholic allegiance remained once the pope‘s ancestors got to Chicago — they just no longer embraced their Black heritage.

Where census takers in Louisiana recorded them as Black, census takers in Illinois recorded them as white. So, too, do other records in Chicago. It isn’t clear whether anyone in Pope Leo’s family today realized that Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, the parents of his mother, were Black.

Portland’s Bishop Healy, though, knew his background.

A Georgia plantation owner purchased a woman named Eliza, at the age of 15, along with her mother and six siblings for a total of $3,700. The owner called Eliza his wife, though legally she couldn’t be. James was their first son.

The Irish-born plantation owner sent James north at the age of 7 to a boarding school in New York, setting off a series of events that eventually led him to become valedictorian of Holy Cross’ first class in 1849 and then into the priesthood.

As bishop in Portland, Healy won lasting acclaim for welcoming French immigrants into the diocese, doubling its size, and for paying special attention to orphans. The Healy Asylum in Lewiston carried his name until it closed in 1970.

When he died in 1900, he chose to be buried in an Irish Catholic cemetery with a Celtic cross making the spot. Even in death, Healy kept passing.

Although, in some sense, we are who we pretend to be, history has a way of intruding.

Whether Pope Leo’s Black ancestry has any bearing on his role, mission or legacy depends on if he chooses to embrace his previously unknown past or if, like Bishop Healy years ago, opts to ignore it.