off topic…but:
According to the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis, the earliest known record of the popes, Victor was from North Africa, while Miltiades and Gelasius likely were born in Rome to families of African origin.
Interestingly, Victor was the first pope to speak Latin because Christians in Rome were still using Greek in the liturgy. As one historian has written, it was “remarkable … that Latin should have won recognition as the language of African Christianity from the outset, while the Roman church was still using Greek.”
But were these three African popes “black” in the sense that we would define race today? And did it matter back then?
The Rev. Cyprian Davis, a Benedictine priest who is a leading historian of African-American Catholicism, notes that by Pope Victor’s time, the Roman aristocracy had large holdings in North Africa. It’s not clear, however, whether these so-called African popes came from those families or from the rural, somewhat darker-skinned indigenous population known as the Berbers.
Davis said the best bet for what we would consider a “black” pope is probably Victor, but he added that the church and the empire of those early centuries were a mosaic of colors and ethnicities.
“It’s important for us to look and say that yes, the early papacy was not white. No, it was much more diverse than you might think,” Davis said.
Moreover, race as we think of it today did not have quite the same meaning back then.
“When you say’black pope,’ you have to think Roman Empire, not African-American,” as Bellitto put it. Some popes in those days — along with many renowned saints and martyrs and bishops like St. Augustine of Hippo — probably looked more like modern Arabs than any pontiff of the last millennium.
faithstreet.com/onfaith/2013/03/01/has-there-ever-been-a-black-or-african-pope
