Simpsons to Saints: How misinformation swirled about Pope's death

RTÉ News​

29-04-2025

Over the past week a torrent of false narratives, misleading videos and ancient prophecies related to Pope Francis and the Vatican has erupted across social media.
Within hours of Pope Francis being brought to St Peter's Basilica in The Vatican last week to lie in state, social media users were posting videos suggesting that discolouration around his face suggested "third-party abuse" or foul play.
His cause of death was a stroke followed by a coma and cardiocirculatory collapse. Medical experts quoted in Italian media said the bruise-like marks on the Pope's face were compatible with this type of stroke, especially in patients in very critical conditions.
The claim that Pope Francis had been abused or killed proved to be just one of a whirlwind of conspiracies that swirled around his final days.
Others involved recirculating of a 'doomsday prophecy' associated with a twelfth century Irish saint, St Malachy Archbishop of Armagh, which was first promoted in the late 1500s and is itself widely considered to hoax.
Elsewhere, in a modern twist, social media users also falsely claimed the Simpsons had correctly predicted the exact date of the Pope's death.
"For people who willfully engage in creating false and misleading content online, there's enormous opportunities for engagement, or for promoting their own agenda, or for financial incentives as well," Ciaran O'Connor of the Institue for Strategic Dialogue told Prime Time.
Mr O'Connor monitors online misinformation and disinformation.
"I do think that there is a significant element of engagement farming or engagement chasing going on, particularly on platforms like X," he said.
"The very nature of those platforms revolves around creating viral content and trying to get attention on that, and maybe some financial motives that kick in down the line."
The claims made relating to predictions in The Simpsons were quickly sourced back to videos posted on social media on the day Pope Francis died.
While captions claimed the videos were from a little-known episode of the series, they instead appear to have been AI-generated.
The Irish saint's 'prophecy' which has also been circulated online is linked to a document known as the Prophecy of the Popes, which is said to have been discovered in the Vatican Archives in 1590 but written hundreds of years prior.
It 'predicted' there would be 112 further popes before Doomsday, something online posters have leapt upon, claiming Pope Francis was the 112th.
They made similar claims when Francis was selected as Pope in 2013. However, reputable Catholic scholars and Vatican historians have said for hundreds of years that the so-called prophecy is a hoax and forgery.
Beyond that there have also been multiple examples of videos taken out of context. For example, a video claiming to show mourners self-flagellating in The Vatican to mourn the death of Pope Francis in fact was footage from a Catholic Easter procession in Spain.
This wave of misinformation is not exactly surprising.
The Pope found himself at the centre of similar campaigns not infrequently. In 2016, a viral post on Meta claiming that he had endorsed President Trump and ordered Catholics not to vote for Hillary Clinton was linked to a content farm in Macedonia spreading fake pro-Trump news stories for profit.
Other unproven claims linked him to the military junta that ruled over Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, some said he was culpable for torture of two Jesuit colleagues who were abducted by security forces.
"You can't also get away from the fact that the Pope himself was someone who was seen as quite outspoken on a number of prominent political geopolitical issues," Mr O'Connor said.
Those issues "attract all types of figures who have their own motivations in creating false or misleading content and maybe piggybacking off the death of Pope Francis to kind of further their own narratives, their own campaigns as well," he added.
When Pope Francis went into hospital on 14 February false rumors of his death ran rampant, with social media influencers and sleuths turning up to the Gemelli Hospital in Rome to try and figure if he was there.
Some falsely claimed that the Pope had already died and the Vatican was covering it up.
Despite multiple updates on the Pope's health, and a voice note from the Pope, online conspiracy theorists insisted that deepfake audio recordings were being used to 'hide the truth.'
Major deaths and world events often trigger such surges of misinformation, according to Mr O'Connor, who noted the additional layer of intrigue and mysticism added this time by the role, history, and secrecy of the Church.
For Mr O'Connor, it is fertile ground for conspiracy to thrive.
"As an institution, the Catholic Church is steeped in all types of rituals, all manner of secrecy. Of course, there's numerous kinds of scandals or cover ups," Mr O'Connor said.
"All of these traits can be used to paint the Catholic Church as the kind of secret, or esoteric, organisation that is so often found at the core of conspiracy theories. The Church itself is often seen as a kind of gateway to power or control, and that kind of balance between good and evil."
Pope Francis himself addressed the dangers of disinformation in a 2018 message.
He said it "discredits others, presenting them as enemies, to the point of demonising them and fomenting conflict.