(ZENIT News – Caffe Storia / Rome, 03.03.2025).- Since February 14, the day in which Pope Francis was admitted to the Gemelli Hospital, the manipulations have multiplied. And I’m not referring to the persistent rumors about his “renunciation.”
In the flow of news about the Pontiff’s health, for some days now there has been a growing number of false photographs and animations created with the aid of AI. Some of them are in the limbo between the devotional and the absurd, with Jesus, Mary and Angels next to the Holy Father’s bed.
Others are built to be particularly truthful, in addition to insidious: resuscitation machines, oxygen masks, cannulas. The result of the so-called deepfake, the latest toxin of misinformation, capable of infecting even quite a few prayer messages of the unsuspecting. Ironically, many of the «best» fakes were made with Grok, the artificial intelligence of X, the boast of Elon Musk.
On one hand, Pope Francis demonstrates to be a viral phenomenon with few rivals. On the other, the urge to stand out — even at a time that worries most believers — is irresistible to some, and it’s worth the risk of crossing the line into bad taste.
Falsifications of this sort have the potential to generate confusion, support factions’ propaganda, not to speak of their role in scams. Common sense should be a sufficient antidote against certain poisonous manifestation of the Net, but it’s no guarantee.
It is worth recalling that it’s not very probable that genuine photographs of Pope Francis in hospital will be available. Since 1996, fifteen years after the attack against John Paul II (and of one of the most famous photographs of his pontificate, in which he appeared smiling and sore in a hospital bed), Pope Wojtyla’s own Apostolic Constitution «Universi Dominici Gregis» makes it clear that «no one is permitted to use any means to take images of the Supreme Pontiff, sick in bed or dead, nor to record his words with any instrument and reproduce them» (n. 30).
Proof that morbid curiosity, and a certain type of speculation, know no time. Only, in times that were no less suspicious but less technological, it was necessary to limit oneself to the oldest of stratagems: theft.
The now controversial archaeologist Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi, the «Pope’s doctor,» resorted to this in 1958. On the night of October 5 of that year, Pius XII suffered ischemia. While he was in a coma, intubated and watched by a nun, Galeazzi Lisi secretly took some photographs of him, which he sold to the French magazine Paris Match. The next day, unexpectedly, Pius XII recovered, only to die on the morning of the following October 9. Galeazzi Lisi was also responsible at that time for the grotesque embalming of the Pope’s body. Because the problem does not lie in the overabundance of AI, but in the defect of natural intelligence, and of ethics.
Translation of the Italian original into Spanish by ZENIT’s Editorial Director and, into English, by Virginia M. Forrester.
