A Woke Republican? Pope Leo XIV’s Politics Are Misrepresented by Both the Left and Right
By Sarah Komar and Giulia Pozzi
What happened: Within hours of his election as pope, social media users scrambled to assign Illinois-born Pope Leo XIV an American political identity, spreading false claims both about him being a Republican and about his supposed embrace of “woke” politics.
A closer look: Almost immediately, viral posts claimed that Pope Leo was a registered Republican in Illinois, based on what appeared to be a screenshot of a voting record for a “Robert F Prevost” of Will County, Illinois, which included the notation “Party Republican.”
The earliest example of the false claim identified by NewsGuard was a May 8 X post by conservative commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who shared the screenshot and said: “SCOOP: Our Turning Point Action team pulled the voting history for Pope Leo XIV. He’s a registered Republican who has voted in Republican primaries when not living abroad.” The post received 6.5 million views and 32,000 likes in a day.
Actually: Illinois does not have a political party registration system, so it is not possible that the new pope registered as a Republican.
Those wishing to vote in an Illinois primary election must request a ballot from a political party, but that does not mean these voters are registered to that party.
Prevost voted in Republican primary elections in 2012, 2014, and 2016, and in Democratic primaries in 2008 and 2010, according to data from the Will County Clerk’s Office and L2 Data, a paid service used by political campaigns to access individual voter files.
It is unclear from what website the screenshot describing Prevost’s party as Republican was taken or if it is a manipulated image. Illinois State Board of Elections spokesperson Matt Dietrich told fact checking organization Lead Stories (NewsGuard Trust Score: 100/100) that it was not from the websites of either the Will County Clerk's Office or the Illinois State Board of Elections.
Across the aisle: Other social media users say that Pope Leo supports “woke” ideology, claiming that he once declared, “To be called ‘woke’ in a world that sleeps through suffering is no insult — it is Gospel.”
In a May 9 Threads post, liberal user @hagenmomma shared an image of Pope Leo with the purported quote and stated: “Oh I’m gonna like him. I’m not catholic but I do have woke morals.” The post received 14,000 likes and 770 shares in three days.
Actually: There is no record of the pope ever making such a statement, and people citing it on social media have not provided any sources or said when Leo supposedly said it.
Indeed, the image shared by users of Pope Leo and the quote carries a watermark in the bottom left corner from imgflip.com, an online meme generator, suggesting that the image was created as satire.