Two short days after Pope Leo stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Square, a strange sentence leaped out of my husband’s mouth: “You are only two degrees of Kevin Bacon to the new Pope!”

For anyone unaware of the social phenomenon of “the degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon,” it all started when the actor made a flippant comment in 1994 about having “worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them.”

The idea — which didn’t actually begin with Kevin Bacon — is that we’re all connected in some way to one another.

My husband’s utterance was the result of a thread that had begun to unravel just hours after Pope Leo’s appearance. At precisely 8 p.m. on May 8, a priest friend, Father Tim Schroeder, reached out to me, sharing that he’d once attended a Mass “with” Bishop Robert Prevost.

Troy’s comment essentially acknowledged that because I know Father Tim, and Father Tim had been in the Pope’s presence, I am connected to the Pope by association. 

It works this way: The smaller the number, the greater the degree of connection. So, if I were the Pope’s mother, my degree of separation from him would be one. Father Tim’s degree of separation in this case would be one, and because I’m connected to Father Tim, mine would be two. 

Father Tim was our first priest after we moved back to North Dakota from Washington state in the late 1990s. He celebrated the baptism of several of our children, attended the birth of our first daughter, and comforted us with prayer in our home the night we lost our third child in a miscarriage. 

While he’s no longer in Fargo, we’ve stayed in touch, and though I was surprised to learn that he’d crossed paths with our new Pope, I wasn’t surprised at how. 

At one of our first Masses back at the Church of the Nativity in Fargo, where we’d been married five years earlier, a visiting priest, Father Jack Davis, celebrated Mass there, sharing about his mission work in Peru. 

Father Jack’s decades-long service to the poorest of the poor in Chimbote had resulted in the establishment of the Friends of Chimbote (FoC) nonprofit, a ministry striving to transform lives and communities by nurturing, building, educating, innovating and healing, guided by Christian principles.

Through their ties to this mission, Father Tim and several other Fargo priests — along with laypeople — had taken several trips to Chimbote, Peru, where Father Jack, a Fargo diocesan priest who’d been given special permission by our bishop to serve the people there, had been since the 1970s. 

Annually, a group from the ministry in our area visits Chimbote in the fall to do service projects and assess the needs, returning to the Midwest to raise funds for the work. But in 2015, a special event was planned in Chimbote: the beatification of three European martyrs who had been serving in the area and were mercilessly killed by the Marxist group known as the Shining Path. The Fargo missionaries, including Father Tim, decided to delay their annual fall trip to December that year to attend the beatification Mass and honor the martyrs.

However, not only did they attend the Mass, but later that evening, despite being fatigued after a week of service work, the missionaries met at a Brazilian steakhouse to enjoy a meal with clergy from the area who’d attended the Mass. 

Several who were there that evening shared that, at one point, the archbishop wanted to welcome the foreigners but wasn’t confident in his English, so he sent Bishop Robert Prevost over to the Fargo table.

This moment is encapsulated in a snapshot taken by Miguel Koo Chia, a previous board member of the nonprofit, who happened to raise his camera and click at the very moment a Fargo physician, Napoleon “Lucho” Espejo, a native of Chimbote, was shaking the hand of the future Pope. 

Fast-forward a decade. On May 8, Lucho said he noticed a text from a friend asking if he knew Pope Leo. Though he’d recently become aware that a Peruvian bishop was in the running, he had no recollection of meeting the future Pope in 2015. “No,” he texted back.

But only minutes later, his daughter, Natalia Madden, writing from her home in Zambia, Africa, texted a photo, which she’d seen on Facebook, of her father shaking the future Pope’s hand, followed with one word: “Really?!”

At that, the memory of that evening was revived for Lucho, and he shared about the funny experience of denying knowing the Pope, “And within two minutes, I’m shaking his hand!” 

He now recalled how Bishop Prevost had been very quiet initially, sitting away from their table, but after being nudged by his superior, “he came over and just talked to us a while and asked what we were doing in Peru,” and he seemed sincerely interested in their work. 

While the night was mostly a blur in Father Tim’s memory, and he didn’t recall meeting Bishop Prevost, he explained that the beatification Mass had really affected him. “So much was going through my head with those martyrs,” he said. “They were about my age.”

Not only were they about his age, but he’d considered joining Father Jack’s efforts in Peru for a time, learning Spanish in preparation. Though his bishop ultimately said he was needed at home, he explained, Father Tim has pastored several parishes in North Dakota with Spanish-speaking communities, keeping his missionary spirit alive in his own neighborhood. 

“Someone said [the Pope] spent a third of his life in the U.S., a third in Peru and a third in Rome,” Father Tim said, musing that, “all because of a few people’s choices,” North Dakota and Peru are intricately woven together, a connection pointing to how our new Roman Pontiff shares many of the same concerns of the Friends of Chimbote ministry and “a common heart.”

In the fall, on All Saints’ Day, Troy and I plan to be in Rome. I am praying that when that time comes, our degree of separation from Pope Leo will go from a two to a one, God willing. 

I realize, of course, that we are just two people in millions who have felt a connection to our new Pope, especially in the places he has called home. From Chicago to Chimbote and many spots in between, ever since we learned the identity of our new Holy Father, Catholics far and wide have been sharing their connections with him. 

For example, another priest I interviewed, just 45 minutes from Fargo in Minnesota, Father Lucho Palomino, was formed by Professor Robert as a seminary student at the Colegio Seminario San Carlos y San Marcelo in Trujillo, Peru. 

Pope Leo’s presence has been palpably felt in so many places, but beyond some of the cursory connections lie stories of great depth — of a priest who narrowly escaped death despite being on a renegade group’s hit list; of other servants of God who did not survive that tumultuous time; and of vulnerable families who, to this day, desperately need the care of strangers. 

Truthfully, I have no idea if Kevin Bacon has a close degree of separation to the Pope. But what I’ve been reminded of recently is that we are all one big family, interconnected in some form, often in the most sublime ways. And each day, opportunities come before us to enhance those connections and continue spreading God’s love to every corner. 

Ultimately, most of us will never have the chance to shake a pope’s hand, but we can be assured that zero degrees of separation exist between us and God, for he is always just a breath away, infused by love into our very being.