An article circulating on social media reportedly reported that Pope Francis had been “arrested” on January 9. This post is fake.
The article, visible here (archive version archive.vn/ivJVo), was published on January 10 by a website that describes itself as a Canadian conservative news website (here), called The Conservative Beaver.
Some users commenting on the article apparently refer to the conspiracy theory QAnon, which often refers to a “secret campaign” waged by US President Donald Trump against a sex trade involving prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and the “deep state” ‘include allies. (here). Comments include the QAnon slogan “WWG1WGA”, short for Where We Go One, We Go All (here).
Reuters found no reports from reputable news organizations to support this claim. The permanent observer of the mission of the Holy See to the United Nations, Reverend Father Roger Landry, confirmed by email to Reuters that “there is no truth to the allegations” of the arrest of Pope Francis.
Reuters had earlier dismissed a similar false allegation from the Conservative allegation about President Barack Obama here.
ROLLER ARTICLE
The first paragraph of the alleged report states: “Pope Francis, aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was arrested on Saturday in connection with a charge of 80 charges, including possession of child pornography, human trafficking, incest, possession of drug paraphernalia and crimes. “
It contains an alleged statement by Giuseppe Governale, Italy’s biggest anti – mafia prosecutor, which reads: ‘These individuals are truly the worst of the worst in society. I can promise you, we will not stop targeting human trafficking until we have stopped this heinous trade in the Vatican and Italy, as well as the surrounding countries in Europe. Although I am a Chief Prosecutor in Italy, my department will strive to protect our citizens, especially those we need most, our children ”.
A Google search shows that the mentioned “charges” and the “statement” are virtually the same – with small details changed to suit the new circumstances – as the one visible here in a local report of January 7, 2021 on the arrest of a man identified as Grady Paul Gaston III in Limestone County, Alabama.
Instead of referring to an “80-count charge” as the conservative Beaver article does, the WHNT report mentions a “75-count charge”. The “charges” of the fake article also contain ‘crimes’.
The statement falsely attributed to Governale was in fact made by Limestone County Sheriff Kevin Turner. The Conservative Beaver article replaced the words Vatican and Italy with “Madison County” and the reference to “provinces around our state” with “countries around Europe”. The word ‘sheriff’ has been replaced by ‘chief prosecutor in Italy’.
The arrest in Limestone County has also been reported here by other local stores.
PUBLIC APPEARANCE
On January 10, a day after the alleged ‘arrest’, Pope Francis led the Angelus prayer (here) from the Library of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. He was also active on Twitter twitter.com/Pontifex .
On January 11, he announces an amendment to the Roman Catholic Church Act to allow women to serve as readers at liturgies, altar ministers, and distributors of communion (here).
Pope Francis’ schedule for January 11 is also visible here at the Holy Sea press office.
“BLACKOUT”
The Conservative Beaver article claims that security officers “had to cut off the power in the Vatican, as well as dim the live camera” to carry out the arrest. This is also false: there are no reliable reports of this alleged eclipse and the “evidence” posted on social media with this claim has been refuted.
As ‘evidence’, the article contains tweets (for example: here ) which contains snippets of what appears to be a live broadcast of St. Peter’s Square by Vatican Media (see the blue logo in the lower left corner).
On January 10, Mountain Butorac, founder of the blog Catholic Traveler (here) in Rome, visited St. Peter’s Square to refute the claim.
Around timestamp 3:14 youtu.be/FFEThJF7HF0?t=194, Butorac shows that while the live camera footage from the Vatican (here) at that moment displays a darker night image, behind it the same area is visibly more illuminated. , pointing out that this is probably a problem with video lighting.
On Twitter here , Butorac also denied the allegation that there were ‘gunshots’, as some users claim.
VERDICT
Untrue. Pope Francis was not arrested. The fake article, published by a website that has spread disinformation in the past, contains charges copied from a sheriff’s statement in connection with a related arrest in Alabama.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.