It makes sense that popes have family members - weird aunts, alcoholic uncles, mothers with online shopping addictions - but having never been presented with this information, I don’t think that any of us really considered it. Personally, I’d always just assumed that popes teleported to earth at the age of 75 with minimal backstory.
Before Pope Leo, if you’d asked me how a pope-in-waiting lived, I’d have presumed that they resided in some kind of underground monastry stuck in the 12th century, unaware of pop culture or modern technology. Perhaps I’d have thought that they bathed in rivers and spent their evenings reading parchment papers by candlelight.
