In a private audience at the Vatican, Dominican priest Father Thomas Joseph White gave Pope Leo XIV four albums from his bluegrass band, the Hillbilly Thomists. 

The priest, who is a founding member of the Billboard-chart-topping bluegrass band and currently resides at the Angelicum in Rome, told the Register he "hopes the Holy Father will listen to them."

Comprised entirely of Dominican friars, the Hillbilly Thomists have toured across the country, sharing the stage with Dominican nuns and big names like the Zac Brown Band. Their first self-titled album released in 2017 lived at the top of the Billboard Bluegrass chart for weeks. 

Speaking to the Register in 2022 after the release of their second album, Holy Ghost Power, Father White said of the music, "We wanted to [give] an unambiguous allusion both to Americana Christian music and also to our kind of unique style of combining Catholic theology with folk music, bluegrass music."

And now, four years later, the unique melodies, rhythms and soul-searching lyrics might just be heard inside the halls of the Apostolic Palace as the first American-born Pope now has every copy of the Catholic band that took the music industry by storm. 

Some members of the band have backgrounds in music and have incredible virtuosity. Father Thomas Joseph White plays the banjo, steel guitar and the dulcimer. Father Simon Teller plays the fiddle and one friar, Father Peter Gautsch, plays five instruments including the mandolin, the slide guitar, harmonica, guitar and the piano. The upright bass, drums and more guitarists can be heard on every album. 

The unique name of the band is inspired by a letter that Flannery O’Connor wrote, as Father Gautsch told the Register when the last album came out: 

“In addition to her many short stories and her two novels, she has a collection of wonderful letters. And one of the letters, she says, 'Everyone who’s read my novel, Wise Blood, thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist. But actually, I’m a hillbilly Thomist.’ And, of course, as a follower of the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and his method of theology, his sapiential approach to theology, as really coming to understand God and everything that God creates [that makes sense].

“And she loved Thomas Aquinas; she used to read him at night, when she was sort of preparing for bed, and would read some of the Summa each day and make references to his work in her letters and in other places. So she was a lover of St. Thomas Aquinas, who, of course, was a Dominican. So, we, too, are lovers of St. Thomas Aquinas; and given her sort of Southern sensibilities, in the Southern character of some of our music, being from the Bluegrass country tradition a bit … it seemed a perfect name for our group.”

Father White currently serves as the rector of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, an institution that boasts the current Pope Leo XIV among its alumni. 

Speaking about the beauty of living in community with fellow friars and sharing faith through music during a past interview, Father White told the Register, “It’s interesting to go from Eucharistic communion into a studio and try to work together on songs that we love and that we want to be creative about and professional about. And that is a kind of just pure gift of fraternal creativity for the Church and also for our own Dominican life.”

Now these slices of Dominican life may soon be on rotation inside Vatican City, and we hope Pope Leo enjoys a taste of Americana in Roma!