(ZENIT News / Rome, 10.16.2025).- At 3 a.m. in Rome, when most of the city sleeps under the hum of streetlamps and distant bells, a certain user named “Robert” was racking up experience points on Duolingo. Within forty-eight hours, he had earned 30,000 XP — a number impressive enough to light up Reddit threads and intrigue Catholic media. Then came the revelation: the user’s handle, @DrPrevost, matched the name of the man now sitting on the Chair of Peter — Pope Leon XIV.
The Catholic Herald was among the first to note the connection, pointing out that the account’s early activity showed lessons in German and, later, Italian. The timing, too, seemed to fit: after more than a year of dormancy, the account had suddenly come alive again, its late-night sessions corresponding to the hours of a notoriously sleepless pontiff.
For a Pope who has surprised the world with gestures of humility and flashes of humor, the image of him swiping through Duolingo screens — chased by the app’s relentless green owl — feels oddly fitting.
But the linguistic ambition is not without purpose. The former Cardinal Robert Prevost, who spent decades in Peru as an Augustinian missionary and later served as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, is known for his near-encyclopedic grasp of languages. Fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, he has long understood German — though Vatican watchers say he rarely speaks it. Now, apparently, he’s changing that.
The Pope’s public greeting to German pilgrims during the closing Mass of the Youth Jubilee this summer — delivered in a clean, confident “Guten Morgen!” — may owe a small debt to Duolingo’s exercises. One could almost imagine the notification popping up on his phone hours earlier: “You’ve maintained your 30-day streak. Keep going, Your Holiness!”
What seems like a trivial curiosity has a deeper resonance in the current ecclesial landscape. Leon XIV’s renewed effort to learn German comes at a moment when relations between Rome and Germany remain delicate. The “Synodal Way,” Germany’s ambitious and controversial reform process, has generated both theological tension and linguistic distance between Vatican officials and German bishops. Mastering the language, some observers suggest, might be the Pope’s way of bridging that gap personally — and symbolically.
Language learning, after all, has long been a hallmark of missionary empathy. The Pope who speaks six tongues knows that each word carries more than grammar; it carries a world. “To learn a language,” he once said as a bishop, “is to learn how someone else hopes.”
Whether the Pope is grinding lessons in “Genitive Case” or “Polite Conversation” is anyone’s guess. What’s clear is that the digital traces of @DrPrevost have delighted many online — an unexpected blend of sanctity and meme culture. “Imagine missing your Duolingo streak and disappointing the Pope,” one Reddit user joked.
Perhaps the story says less about technology and more about continuity: a shepherd willing to keep learning, even from a cartoon owl. In an age of division, the image of the Pope studying German verbs in the quiet hours of dawn feels like a small but luminous metaphor — that communication, not condemnation, remains his chosen language.
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