“John, I’m the Pope” — Viral Nikes, Car Talk, and the Disarming Humanity of Leo XIV
Fr. Jim Sichko just handed Leo XIV a pair of custom Nikes, and we learned about Pope Leo XIV’s tech repair work for his brother. The world is meeting Bob Prevost one delightful detail at a time.
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Father Jim Sichko came to see Pope Leo XIV on May 27 carrying a shoebox. Inside sat a pair of custom Nikes, hand-painted by Lexington artist Billy Hobbs of True Blue Customs, and the Kentucky priest presented them personally to the pope — the second pair he has put in this pope’s hands.
Sichko, one of the Church’s roving Missionaries of Mercy, has refined the art of the papal gift over years of Roman visits. Bourbon was long his calling card; in 2022 he commissioned Hobbs to paint a pair of Nike Blazers in the white and gold of the papal flag for Pope Francis.
His generosity reaches well past footwear. The Missionaries of Mercy added a $10,000 gift for Chiclayo, Leo’s old diocese in Peru; Delta, too, was generous — $100,000 for the Augustinians, his own order. Sichko brought Delta president Peter Carter along for the May visit, and through my own reporting, I can tell you Delta has agreed to fly the pope around the United States for free whenever he makes his papal trip home.
The arrangement already looks shrewd. This week the engine on Leo’s chartered Iberia jet failed on the tarmac in Tenerife, and King Felipe VI ended up flying the pope home to Rome on a Spanish royal Falcon.
This time, the sneakers answered a viral moment. In May, around the first anniversary of Leo’s election, the Vatican released the trailer for “Leone a Roma,” a documentary about the American pope — and eagle-eyed viewers spotted a 2008 photograph of a young Father Robert Prevost at World Youth Day in Sydney wearing white Nike Franchise Lows.
The internet responded with reverence and memes. “Forgive me, Father, for I have dripped,” ran one of the kinder posts, and within days a discontinued 1970s tennis shoe became the most discussed footwear in the Catholic world.
Many traditionalists had hoped that Leo — who restored the red papal mozzetta to the loggia on the night of his election — would also bring back the red papal shoes Benedict XVI made famous. He has stuck instead with the plain black workman shoes Francis favored. Where the new Nikes now live is a mystery the Vatican press office has not addressed.
Leo’s footwear had already started one argument this year. Back in February, when critics groused that an altar girl wore sneakers while serving his Mass in the Roman suburb of Ostia, I pointed out on X that the man at the altar seems fond of a good pair himself.
In mid-May, a group of kids pulled Leo into a meme. The Genoa priest and Catholic influencer Don Roberto Fiscer had brought a class of confirmation students to meet the pope at St. Peter’s, and when he asked them to show Leo what they do, they shouted “6-7” and bobbed their palms up and down in the hand sign that has swallowed middle-school cafeterias whole.
Leo paused for a beat, then bobbed his own hands and said it back: “6-7.” Fiscer’s clip crossed twenty million views, and a phrase Dictionary.com had just crowned its word of the year suddenly had a pontiff doing the bit. He did it again as recently as Friday in the Canary Islands, where a twenty-year-old at a Tenerife migrant center asked the pope to join in and Leo happily obliged with a smile.
The shoes belong to a growing file of small revelations the world keeps collecting about this pope, and his trip to Spain filled the file considerably.
