You couldn’t have written it any better − the first American pope and a “Sopranos” connection.
As the 133 cardinals who voted during the papal conclave became more known to the public in recent days, enjoying a brief bout of internet fame, some close watchers began to notice that one looked shockingly similar to a television mafioso.
Father Robert Alan Sirico, who was in Rome for the religious vote which ultimately anointed Pope Leo XIV as the next pontiff, is, in fact, the younger brother of Tony Sirico, who played Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri on “The Sopranos.”
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Tony Sirico, who died in 2022, played Gualtieri, Tony Soprano’s eccentric and paranoid henchman, for all six seasons of the hit HBO mob show.
His brother, Robert Sirico, is both a cardinal and a co-founder of the Acton Institute, a conservative religious think tank based out of Michigan.
The pair grew up on the edge of the Brooklyn borough, in the Bensonhurst and East Flatbush neighborhoods of New York City. From a family of Italian descent, the brothers took wildly different paths, with Robert Sirico going the route of the faithful and Tony heading first for some run-ins with the law, then to Hollywood.
“Where I grew up, every guy was trying to prove himself. You either had to have a tattoo or a bullet hole,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 profile. “I had both.”
He was arrested over 25 times before and spent two stints in prison before landing his defining role on “The Sopranos.”
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Robert Sirico became a priest in 1989 and spoke fondly of his brother at his funeral in July 2022, according to local publication The Brooklyn Reporter.
“As many of the professional actors who are here know, people often confuse the actor with the act,” he said of his brother. “When you look beneath that rough defensive armor, as Michael Imperioli called it last night at the wake, you begin to see a softer, gentler interior.”
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Telling a story about a time when his brother skipped Mass after failing to attend communion, Robert Sirico recalled: “I said to him, ‘Junior, you are the last bad Catholic in America.'”
“All the rest think they’re entitled to come to communion without that preparation,” he continued. “That revealed to me a seriousness which he had about repairing himself and an awareness of his own completeness and a necessity for confession before encountering a Holy God. I think that was his redemption.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New pope conclave and ‘The Sopranos’: The odd link
