Gabrielle Pitre \u201926 was sitting at her kitchen table in Seattle over spring break when an email from the Diocese of Lafayette popped up on her phone. Inside were the baptismal records of her great-grandparents\u2014written in French, from a long-ago Louisiana she\u2019d only ever known through family stories.<\/p>\n
That moment was the culmination of a year of combing through museum articles, tracing family stories, and hunting census and church records as part of Pitre\u2019s Hackworth Fellowship at Santa Clara University\u2019s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics<\/a>. Pitre focused her project on how Black Catholics reconcile their faith identity and racial identity through tracing her own Catholic Creole ancestry back to 18th-century Louisiana.<\/p>\n \u201cReflecting on ancestral lineage is a central part of African American culture,\u201d she explains. \u201cWatching the racial reckoning in the last decade, I began to think more about my ancestors\u2019 journeys as both Black and Catholic. What thoughts and feelings did my ancestors have when they baptized their children into Catholicism while their people were treated as commodities by other Catholics?\u201d<\/p>\n Pitre\u2019s research took her deep into Louisiana history, where she discovered that, remarkably, she and Pope Leo XIV share a common ancestor: Marie Jeanne Davion. From that ancestor, Pitre found a multigenerational story of survival, faith, and resilience that stretched from the antebellum South to the present.<\/p>\n \u201cOftentimes, we are pressured by society to separate our racial identity from our faith identity. However, this process has shown me that both can coexist and create a beautiful and unique experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Her research eventually became an article in America<\/a>\u2014the largest Jesuit periodical in the U.S.\u2014adding \u201cpublished author\u201d to her resume before crossing the graduation stage. But the confidence she gained from this accomplishment actually started closer to home.<\/p>\n