Often the talk of machinations involving the Holy Father has come from unorthodox sources.
“He is really dead,” Fabrizio Corona, an Italian celebrity paparazzo involved with many of the country’s sordid scandals, said onstage outside a shopping mall in Italy’s northern Emilia-Romagna region. He offered no evidence for the claim, and he dismissed the material put out by the Vatican.
“The audio is fake,” he said. “It’s done with artificial intelligence.”
It is unclear how many Italians have been taking the spurious claims seriously, but there’s no doubt there are a lot of false reports. Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv that monitors disinformation, said that of a sample of over 3,600 accounts posting about Pope Francis’ health that it looked at, about a third were fake.
“It becomes worrying and incredibly alarming,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, a spokesman for the company.
The death of a pope, Mr. Mendelsohn noted, is an emotional topic that can trigger strong reactions. “It’s really ripe as a topic, if your objective is to create chaos and create distrust and spread confusion,” he said.
The Catholic Church, ideologically divided as it is between Francis’ supporters and his critics on the right, is no stranger to machinations and conspiracy theories.
In 2020, the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a vocal critic of the pope, repeated a conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines were being used to implant microchips “under the skin of every person, so that at any moment, he or she can be controlled.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/world/europe/pope-francis-disinformation.html
