When Pope Leo XIV stepped onto a balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square in Vatican City on May 8, he unknowingly arrived along with millions upon millions of fans worldwide on the Internet.
If former US President Barack Obama’s social networking was his real strength in 2009, the pope’s strong understanding of the ways of the Internet may make the message of peace travel as fast as a meme or a Reddit discussion.
Is he a Chicago White Sox or Cubs fan? Is God going to support the Philadelphia 76ers in a match with the Knicks because Robert Francis Prevost — aka the pope — was a student of Villanova University in Pennsylvania? These are questions the 69-year-old can easily relate to.
A couple of weeks ago, the r/Catholicism subreddit had a discussion on Prevost in the company of his friends in 2004 and a comment said the man has a “cubicle worker drip”.
Had the first American pope seen the subreddit, he would have replied with a grin.
Given his current position, his team may have done some spring cleaning on his X/Twitter timeline. The moment he stepped into his papacy, all eyes were on the now deleted @drprevost of which The Telegraph has screenshots.
The Vatican has neither accepted or denied whether the account was that of then Cardinal PrevoSt.
Nearly all the posts shared articles and statements made by other church leads and not by him. His official account, curated by the Dicastery for Communication, on X now is @Pontifex with 18.7 million followers.
On February 3, @drprevost shared a link to an opinion piece titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” Going back to August 1, 2015, the account posted a Washington Post article titled: “Cardinal Dolan: Why Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is so problematic.” The Pope’s predecessor too was critical of certain policies of Trump.
The US vice-president J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said the country was “very proud” of the Chicago-born pontiff. US President Donald Trump said “to have the Pope from America is a great honour” even though a few days before white smoke billowed from the Sistine Chapel chimney the 78-year old posted an AI-generated image of himself as the pope.
Pope Leo XIV’s Instagram game is on point, delivering messages of peace and hope to 13.8 million followers, already overtaking the late Pope Francis’s count of 10.5 million.
He has been quick to make artificial intelligence an early focus.
In his first formal address as pope, he told the College of Cardinals that artificial intelligence poses risk to “human dignity, justice and labour”.
He chose to name himself after Pope Leo XIII (led the Catholic church from 1878 to 1903), who maintained a dedication to social issues and workers rights when the world had been reshaped by the Industrial Revolution.
“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour,” he said.
Like the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of generative AI is transforming the world and a question mark hangs over its impact on human labour.
When AI images were taking off in 2023, one of the first fake images to do the rounds online was that of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket.