If this is the case, it means I share ancestry with Pope Leo XIV through my great-grandmother Eugenie Lemelle’s paternal lineage going back to where I started the story of my ancestry in this piece—Marie Jeanne Davion. My very, very, distant cousin is the pope!
Gabrielle Pitre
Gabrielle Pitre is a senior at Santa Clara University from Seattle, Wash. She wrote this article as part of her Hackworth Fellowship at the university’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, where she has studied under the guidance of the center’s director of Religious and Catholic Ethics, David DeCosse.