Summary and Commentary by Br. Alexis Bugnolo
A man’s politics usually have a lot to do with his family history, and while the sins of one’s grandfather do not pass down to grandsons, in the case of Cardinal Prevost, neither did the grandfather’s surname.
The story is highly explosive.
Cardinal Prevost’s real surname is Sicilian: Riggitano
His real paternal Grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano, was born at Milazzo, Sicily on June 24, 1876. I know Milazzo well, having visited it 3 times, since it is the birth place of my mother’s maternal grandparents. It is also very near to the birth place of the grandparents of President Biden’s wife, who was born in a little village up-slope from Milazzo.
But Prevost’s grandfather was not of the same cloth. According to Milazzo town hall, Riggitano married before he left Italy. But when he arrived in the United States in 1904, as he claimed in 1940, he declared the name Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano Alioto. — Alioto means a man from Ali, a small village in the province of Messina, the same province as Milazzo. — He then changed his first name to John, to avoid discrimination, which as an Italian-American I can testify to, even if none of my relatives changed their names to avoid it.
Grandpa Riggitano was an adulterer, and perhaps also a bigamist
Ten years later, he married a woman named Daisy Hughes in 1914. Then three years later he had an affair with a Louise Marie Fontaine, whose maternal grandfather was a Mr. Prevost. In 1917, in the U.S.A. adultery was a crime, so after being arrested for adultery, and released, Riggitano fled with his girl friend and abandoned Daisy. He then married Suzanne under the name Jean Prevost, in New York State, to avoid being charged with bigamy.
And that surname, Prevost stuck. In fact the father of the Cardinal has a birth certificate which claims that Jean Prevost was born in France. His two sons born under that name, therefore, are technically bastards, or illegitimate. His grandfather might have committed sacrilege by being married the third time in a Catholic Church. But he is certainly guilty of falsifying a Birth record, if he used the name Jean Provost without going to a civil court to have it legally changed.
The Riggitano-Prevost Family has a shaky claim to be good Catholics
To say that Prevost came from a good Catholic family is going to be hard to sell. The reality is that he is the grandson of a bigamist, con-artist and adulterer and document fraudster. Can we wonder what his morals are, or if he has personal reasons to support ‘Fiducia supplicans’ or ‘Amoris laetitia’? I think we have more than a right to do so!
Riggitano might be a Jewish Surname
The surname Riggitano means “a man from Reggio di Calabria“. However, surnames which name cities in Italy, are highly suspect, because they are usually used only by Jews. Salvatore and Giovanni are very very common names in the province of Messina. Reggio is the major port on the very tip of the toe of the boot of Italy. It was the cross roads of the Mediterranean. Many Jews fleeing the Ottoman Empire came through that port.
In fact, in this video a female Jewish rabbi discuss Jews who resided and passed through Reggio. So at last we might know why Prevost as soon as he was selected pope issued a message to world Jewry. This rabbi has a page identifying Reggio as a Jewish colonized town. However, this Rabbi exaggerates because before 1492, only 2-3% of the population of Sicily was Jewish. She says 50%.
What was Riggitano doing in his home town of Milazzo?
From this article it is known that Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano is the son of Santi Riggitano and Maria Alioto, who married at Milazzo in 1853 and lived in Via Ottaviana in the heart of the seaside town, which is built on the sand-neck connecting a small mountainous island with the adjacent mainland. — This means that they were neighbors of my mother’s paternal grandfather, Natale De Flavia, who lived in the same quarter and was a chef. Small world, indeed.
Santi and Maria had 11 children, the last of which was the notorious grandfather of Cardinal Riggitano-Prevost, who before emigrating to the United States of America in 1904, worked in the Italian Courts as a clerk, where he probably came to understand how easy it was to fake documents and names.
When Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano entered the U.S.A., he must have known he was not being entirely truthful when he declared his name as Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano Alioto, adding his mother’s surname and dropping his third name to confuse the records, or so he claims in 1940, when he registers as a foreign alien. It is still not certain if he ever became an American citizen.
Sicilians who were poor had one first name and one last name, as I can testify in the history of my own maternal ancestors. Having several names was a sign of wealth or a pretension to wealth. But getting a job in the Italian Court system in the 1890’s likely meant that you have political connections and/or were a member of a local Masonic Lodge, not to mention a good education. It was a good job, and so if he emigrated, one wonders if he might have been caught forging documents in Italy and escaped overseas to avoid discovery or arrest.
His family had to be upper middle class, at the least, to have had 11 children and afford educating their youngest. To make a comparison, my Sicilian grandfather never learned to read or write, having gone to work at 8 in a barbershop and remained in that profession all his life, emigrating legally at the age of 14 and never playing games with his name.
Was Riggitano part of the Sicilian Mafia in Chicago?
Playing games with names is something criminals do, though it is common also among Jews, who change their gentile names for many reasons, since these are not their real names anyhow.
In 1898, six years before Riggitano emigrated, there was a big trial of Mafiosi at Palermo, as the new Kingdom of Italy began to try to control the problem. The Sicilian Mafia were known to bribe officials in court. The 1890’s saw the Sicilian Mafia extend to New York City, New Orleans and Chicago, all cities tied to the history of the Riggitano-Prevost family. Coincidence, or not?
When Riggitano, now Jean Provost, settled back in Chicago in the 1920’s, he moved to Little Sicily, the Sicilian Quarter, which was run by the Genna Crime Family, Sicilian Mafia.
The reason I mention the Sicilian Mafia in Chicago, is because it is known that the Gay Ecclesiastical Mafia hails out of Chicago, even though they are predominantly Irish, not Italian.
But the Genna Gang was an ally of Al Capone, who ran the brothels where Archbishop Marchinkus visited as a young man before he went to seminary, and he took those connections to the Vatican where they eventually got control of the Vatican Bank. They ended up building the Mafia of St. Gallen up by getting them promoted under Pope John Paul II. So is it a total coincidence that Prevost succeeds Bergoglio? or are we looking at the ongoing Mafia control of the Vatican?
However, living under a fake name of Jean Provost, would without a doubt have made Grandpa Riggitano ripe and susceptible to blackmail, an easy way for assets to the Mafia to be recruited.
To give you an idea of just how systemically corrupt the Chicago area is, take a look at this report, which shows that the Dolton area, where Robert Provost grew up was a hotbed for corruption:
UPDATE: May 23, 2025
After a large number of scholars have collaborated more details have come forward about Riggitano and family:
