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On Sunday, May 11, 2025, an estimated 100,000 pilgrims packed St. Peter’s Square. Pope Leo XIV, three days into his pontificate, stepped onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica for his first public Regina Caeli — the Marian prayer Catholics offer in place of the Angelus during the Easter season.

He was supposed to recite it.

Instead, he sang.

The first U.S-born pope began intoning the ancient Marian hymn in a clear, confident Latin, his voice carrying out over Bernini’s colonnade.

The crowd erupted in applause. America’s first pope had given his first sung blessing on Good Shepherd Sunday, on the World Day of Prayer for Vocations — and, by the calendar of half a dozen countries including Italy and the United States, on Mother’s Day.

About that last detail.

The voice belonged, by inheritance, to Mildred Agnes Martínez Prevost, born December 30, 1911, in Chicago and baptized two months later at Holy Name Cathedral.

By the time her youngest son Robert arrived in 1955, Mildred had been singing in the choir at St. Mary of the Assumption parish for years. She was a contralto. Chicago Tribune archives place her as a soloist in a 1940 Mundelein College performance and as a competitor in the 1941 Chicagoland Music Festival.

Her son inherited the instrument and the discipline.

When Pope Leo XIV broke into the Regina Caeli on the loggia last May, what the world heard was an ancient Latin hymn rendered in the unmistakable phrasing of a Catholic boy whose mother took church music seriously. The voice over St. Peter’s Square — the one that drew gasps from a crowd of 100,000 — was hers.

I wrote the full biographical portrait of Mildred for the Letters from Leo Life & Formation series last October.

This Mother’s Day, with the country Mildred helped build under sustained assault, the story bears retelling — this time to a much wider audience.

This is the American story of a woman from Black Creole Louisiana whose son ascended to the Seat of Peter.