On Tuesday night, outside the Rome hospital where Pope Francis is being treated for a complex lung infection, the 8th King of Rome, a self-described “trash influencer” embarked on a secret mission. He wore a wig, hid his pink-and-blue-dyed beard behind a surgical mask and then ventured inside the hospital to show his followers what he thought was the truth: that the pope was not actually there.
The 8th King of Rome, a former funeral home worker whose real name is Simone Basile, is one of many Italians who have flooded social media, telegram channels and WhatsApp chats with unsubstantiated claims that Francis has in fact died and that the papal deep state is hiding the news.
Roman Catholic cardinals have issued calls to “free ourselves from much fake news” on the pope’s health and blamed anti-Francis forces for the circulation of false information. Vatican officials said they were privately discussing the reports as the misinformation traveled from the internet to bar counters, locker rooms and the officials’ own smartphones.
“They say we, the Roman Curia, keep Francis frozen so that we can do our scheming,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.
The chatter seems impervious to the new, more forthcoming communication strategy of the Vatican. The church has broken from its long tradition of secrecy and obfuscation on matters relating to the health of popes by issuing daily, granular updates on Francis’ condition. Some have included graphic detail, such as the pope inhaling on his own vomit.
To online skeptics, that has not been enough. It does not seem to matter that the Vatican said that Francis had improved, and posted a photo and an audio recording of his voice. The church’s reputation as a den of intrigue, coupled with an age in which nothing is taken at face value, has let conspiracy theories run wild.
“It’s the first time, Cardinal Ravasi said, that they are saying the raw truth about the pope’s condition.” Still, he added, “It doesn’t work.”
He said that even reputable reporters were inquiring about unfounded rumors. One found him in St. Peter’s square, the cardinal said, and asked if he had seen Francis being taken back to his residency to die.
“It’s a toxic atmosphere,” Cardinal Ravasi said.
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.”
And while social media has offered a megaphone to spread it, rumor has long run rampant inside and outside Vatican walls. A Vatican official said that he had come across a theory that Pope Paul VI, during his pontificate in the 1960s and 70s, had been shut in the basement of the Vatican and replaced by a look-alike.
Now, obscure social media accounts claim that the photo of Francis the Vatican shared on Sunday was old, or generated by A.I. A former member of the European Parliament questioned Francis’ supposed “tan” in the photo.
The Gemelli hospital, where Francis is being treated, has become a new TikTok destination. Mr. Basile has already gone three times, the videos of his visits gathering millions of views. Another influencer, who goes by Er Bombolino and has a tattoo of Francis’ face on his forearm, also made a trip.
“I want to know if the pope is dead or alive!” he said before peering through a hospital window and asking, “Is the pope dead?”
Nicola Cerbino, a spokesman for the hospital, said that the influencers “are going to places that have absolutely nothing to do” with Francis’ ward. The pope’s private apartment, he said, was “impregnable.”
But the 8th King of Rome was not buying it.
“I did not find him,” he said as he left the hospital on Tuesday. “It’s an unmistakable sign that he is no longer.”
