Where Will Pope Leo XIV, Tennis Fan and Possible Liberal, Take Us on His Papal Social Media Journey?

To spread an ancient gospel these days, you need to employ modern tools. Pope Leo XIV has joined Instagram under the official handle of @pontifex, with 12.7 million followers. His first post on Tuesday afternoon, a 17-slide photo dump, recapped his first few days on the job.

So far, the new Pontifex follows only 32 other accounts, all pope-related and often duplicates of the same outlets in different languages, like the jazzily-branded “Click To Pray,” an official Vatican account sharing prayer prompts across the globe. Not among the follows: any account of Louis Prevost, the pope’s oldest brother, who has made his social media presence private on other platforms after drawing attention for 1. Being the pope’s brother and 2. Posting crude memes about Nancy Pelosi and insulting supporters of former President Joe Biden. In an interview with Piers Morgan this week, Louis described himself as a “MAGA type” and said he’d “probably tone it down” now that lil’ bro is Holy Father. Louis stopped short of describing his sibling as “woke” when prompted.

There’s plenty of opportunity for Pope Leo to utilize his massive new social media reach to be a Cool Pope: He’s not new to the social media game by any means. For years before securing the mitre, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost posted as @drprevost, an account that has now been deleted. Before the internet was washed clean of his tweets, Leo’s thoughts dating back to August 2011 were there for the reading, and included the occasional meme. Notably, a tweet shortly before the papal conclave called out JD Vance as “wrong” for his anti-immigrant stance.

Thanks to a different BOP (Brother of Pope), John Prevost, we know that Leo prepped for the conclave by playing Wordle (the Holy See isn’t losing his streak) and Words With Friends, then revealed that “he had just finished watching the movie Conclave.” Thanks in large part to the recent film, as you’ll recall if you were anywhere near the internet, Conclave Twitter and its resultant memes were absolute fire. Without Conclave, would we have had PopeCrave to give us up-to-the-minute updates on what color smoke was bugging the seagulls? I don’t know, but I thank the heavens that I won’t ever have to find out.

Pope Leo is already the subject of plenty a meme himself—he’s Da Pope, why wouldn’t he be?—but will the first American-born papa to hold the role, embrace his potential to up the Church’s social media game? Pope Francis was liberal with his use of hashtags in captions, as if we may have missed that it was Easter if it wasn’t called out as “#Easter.” There’s potential here for Pope Leo and Vatican Media to ponti-flex.