The Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Monument: The masterwork of Monsignor Nelson Baker, who is portrayed as surrounded by the children he protected, in this sculpture. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

My father grew up at the old St. Joseph’s orphanage in Lackawanna, near Buffalo — a place known more commonly, if informally, as Father Baker’s.

While my dad died in 1988, I think he would be moved and gratified — though maybe not surprised — to learn Baker’s sweeping legacy of life-changing refuge and welcome apparently wrapped in the grandmother and uncle of Pope Leo XIV, and ripples out generationally to include the new pope himself.

Maybe that living history will even be enough to help bring about a moment many thousands have dreamed about for years in Upstate New York: The day when Baker finally becomes a Catholic saint.

Monsignor Nelson Baker — though eternally and casually known as “Father” — was the Catholic priest who envisioned and pieced together the sweeping Our Lady of Victory network of humanitarian services, on a campus within a Lake Erie steel town. While Baker died in 1936, the place remains famous both for his enduring vision of selfless kindness represented by many services today, and for the OLV national shrine and basilica — a towering century-old landmark at the physical center of it all.

When we were kids, my dad would often take us there to show us where he grew up. In 1986, my wife and I joined my parents for an OLV reunion of grown and grateful orphans, who shared an almost universal feeling:

In their collective perspective, Father Baker — who provided them with refuge from abandonment or searing family struggle, whose kindness cascaded through family generations — ought to be canonized, as a Catholic saint.

That generational compassion, we know now, reaches as far as the first American pope.

The larger story, as reported Friday by The New York Times, goes like this: Researchers have already revealed how the new pope’s maternal background involves deep Creole roots. As for the Baker link, The Times reported it was laid out by another group of genealogists, known as the Genealogy Discord, who prepared a report detailing how Pope Leo’s paternal grandparents were European immigrants who became romantically involved in Chicago, in the 1910s.

Other core work was also done by Sean Daly, a Paris-based genealogist with an organization called Geneanet. He wrote a long post about several key elements in the tale, including this one:

The pope’s grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano, was born in Italy. The great love of his life and the pope’s grandmother, Suzanne Fontaine, was a French immigrant. In the end, they would be together 43 years, as Daly noted in an email.

Yet when they met and became a couple, Riggitano was already married to a woman named Daisy Hughes. Based on a complaint lodged by Hughes, The Times reported, Riggitano and Fontaine were arrested and charged with “unbecoming conduct,” an accusation that made its way into the press — though the couple would remain together for the rest of their lives.

Still, Fontaine left Chicago for a while, the genealogists reported. She made stops at points including Detroit and Canada before going to Lackawanna to give birth to the Pope’s uncle, John Centi Prevost, in a place his birth certificate — unearthed this week by Daly, and supplied to me Friday by renowned genealogist Megan Smolenyak — described simply as “The Infant Home.”

An official in the Lackawanna clerk’s office — who said he’s received at least a dozen inquiries about that record in recent days, with several coming from Europe — said that reference is almost certainly to the Infant Home founded by Baker, an initiative recalled in this way in an historical summary on the OLV Human Services web site:

“During (the early 20th century), news spread of thousands of infant bones found in area waterways. Horrified, Father Baker opened OLV Infant Home in 1906 to house and care for abandoned babies and their socially stigmatized, unwed mothers.”

Word of that Infant Home — and the then-unusual kind refuge and protection it offered — spread quickly between cities. The Genealogy Discord, Daly and Smolenyak all say Suzanne Fontaine found her way there, to have a child. A spokesman for OLV Human Services, citing the confidentiality of family records, could not comment on that report.

OLV would have seemed a compelling fit, Daly noted, because Riggitano and Fontaine both had strong Catholic backgrounds. In Lackawanna, in providing her infant son John with his last name — and in establishing the family name the pope himself would carry — Fontaine turned to the family name of her French mother, The Times reported.

Mother and child soon returned to Chicago, where Fontaine gave birth in 1920 to Louis Prevost, the pope’s father. She and Riggitano remained together and would both assume the same last name they gave their children — while sustaining a relationship that continued until their deaths, many decades later.

When you contemplate the social judgments of that era, the public struggle and harsh spotlight the couple had faced in Illinois, the pressure they must have resisted to put their first child up for adoption …

It leaves you to wonder just how much strength and affirmation they took from that sense of sanctuary at the Infant Home, on the OLV campus — and how much it helped tighten the bonds of family that go straight to the new pope, over three generations.

The Our Lady of Victory campus, Lackawanna: Deep impact on a pope’s family. Credit: Sean Kirst | The Central Current

This all feels particularly close because my dad was an “inmate” — as census-takers described the orphans who lived there — at the Lackawanna orphanage until he was 12 or 13. He used to speak of how the boys routinely saw Father Baker around — often in the courtyard during assemblies, or at choir practices, or when they went to Mass.

As I sit here and write this column, birds singing at dawn, I wonder if Suzanne Fontaine — an immigrant and a single mother, far from family and alone in this Lackawanna “infant home” — ever exchanged a word or two with Baker as he walked the halls, and if by chance the pope’s grandmother met the priest who gave her refuge and ran the place …

The same man so many Catholics want to see become a saint.

My father and his brothers went into that orphanage at OLV in the early 1920s, after their mother died. As a teenager, my dad lived briefly with his family, then left town to work with the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. He returned to Buffalo to spend a couple of years in a factory before he was drafted into World War II.

The orphanage provided the core of whatever childhood he remembered. He spoke it of it as generally beneficial, if often involving hard discipline. Years later, when he drove heavy equipment for Niagara Mohawk in Dunkirk, he sometimes brought us to Lackawanna to see the old campus and the basilica, which says everything about his sense of lifetime gratitude.

What I recall most powerfully — the greatest benefit it offered the kids who grew up there, in that era — was this:

My father came out of Father Baker’s knowing his own value, with an understanding that loss and struggle were bedrock strengths in his own story. It was the same quiet self-belief I felt in his fellow “orphans” when we went to that 1986 reunion. The old priest had a way of making vulnerable people — those seemingly cast off by society — feel as much internal worth as anyone else, which is really an ultimate and elevating gift.

A statue of Monsignor Nelson Baker, at the OLV campus. (Sean Kirst: Central Current)

It is the same kind of reception, I suspect, that the Infant Home provided for Suzanne Fontaine, and then for her new baby — and one I have no doubt lifted up her grandson Robert, who was raised in a working-class Chicago neighborhood.

All of it makes me contemplate how the quest to canonize Nelson Baker should be taking on a whole new 21st century relevance and imperative. The wave of sex abuse revelations involving Catholic priests has staggered the church nationally, both philosophically and financially, forcing a long overdue reckoning about clergy who betrayed the children in their care, in the worst way.

Baker’s legacy is the opposite, a kind of higher statement about what the church ought to be: He built his adult life behind a vision of sheltering children and the powerless, kindness that influenced generations and lives on today — which is all manifest in the experience of Pope Leo’s grandmother, more than a century ago.

Maybe someday, then, this pope will be the one to close the entire circle, when he stands in Rome and tells the world that Nelson Baker is a saint.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...