It has been noted that Pope Leo XIV was the son of a working mother who had her children later in life, and that’s true — but what people miss is that Pope Benedict XVI’s and Pope John Paul II’s mothers worked outside the home also. Only Francis had a stay-at-home mom.
Here is a quick review of the home life of the most recent popes.
Pope Leo XIV’s mother: the librarian and singer with a masters degree.
Mildred Martinez Prevost was born in 1912 in Chicago to mixed race parents who had moved there from New Orleans. Two of her sisters became consecrated religious, but she married and had three children.
The Pope’s father, Louis, was a World War II veteran who had served as a Navy lieutenant in the Mediterranean before coming back to Chicago’s South Side to work in the school system while serving as a catechist at their church.
Mildred went to college late in life, earning her bachelor’s degree from DePaul University at age 34 and getting her master’s in education two years later. She worked as a librarian at two high schools: Von Steuben and Mendel.
Her work didn’t keep her from teaching her children to cook and iron and volunteer at the parish.
“She was practically a saint,” Bishop Daniel Turley, who knew Pope Leo XIV in his teens, told the New York Times. “She was just one of those people you meet and you feel the presence of God.”
She was especially known for singing the Ave Maria. “That was her trademark song,” her oldest son Louis said. “She would belt it out.”
Pope Francis’ mom, Regina, was a big presence in his life.
The papal mother with the most children — she had five — was also the one who was a homemaker. She kept Italian customs, making homemade gnocchi for the family, even though, as Pope Francis reported in his autobiography, she claimed she “could not even fry an egg” when she got married.
His father, Mario Bergoglio was an accountant who had fled the fascists in Italy in 1929 but Regina was born in Argentina to Italian immigrants.
She was so delighted when her oldest son briefly considered studying medicine that when he told her he was becoming a priest, he softened the news for his mom by calling his vocation “medicine for souls.”
Pope Francis recalled in his autobiography how, on a return from a visit to Sri Lanka in 2015, he told journalists that moderation was called for in all things — “but if someone insults your mother, it’s normal that he can expect a thump.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s mother, like Leo’s, had three children and a job.
Maria (Rieger) Ratzinger, the mother of Pope Benedict XVI, learned the baking trade from her parents, and worked in several private homes as a cook, before becoming dessert chef at the Hotel Wittelsbach in Munich.
She married Joseph Ratzinger Sr. after responding to a personal ad in the newspaper. She continued to work after the marriage but as her husband, a police officer who opposed the Nazis, got assigned to smaller and smaller locations, work became scarce.
German historian Michael Hesemann spent months interviewing Pope Benedict XVI’s brother about the late Pope’s life growing up. “In America you have a beautiful saying, ‘a family that prays together, stays together,’“ Hesemann told ABC News. “The Ratzinger family secret was they prayed together ... when they had a problem in the family the problem was solved in prayer and that’s why it became such a harmonic family.”
St. John Paul II’s mom held jobs before and after having three children.
His father, the senior Karol Wojtyla, was an army officer, and his mother, Emilia, was a school teacher when they married. Her health was never great, and of her three children, only two survived — her daughter Olga died shortly after birth. In fact, it has recently been revealed that she refused medical advice that she should abort her third child — Karol Wojtyla Jr.
Emilia’s midwife said that Emilia asked that her windows be thrown open after her son was born, so that he would hear the music coming from the church nearby. “I want the first thing my child hears to be a hymn to Our Lady,’ Emilia said.
She worked as a seamstress before dying of heart and kidney failure nine years later.
What all these women had in common was that their families were the center of their lives.
Like the wife described in Proverbs 31, they were sacrificial inside the home always and outside the home when necessary.
As Pope Francis put it: “To be a mother is a great treasure. Mothers, in their unconditional and sacrificial love for their children, are the antidote to individualism; they are the greatest enemies against war.”
