The Pope Francis Puffer Photo Was Real in Our Hearts

Pope Francis, the 86-year-old leader of the Catholic Church, is an unconventionally laidback dresser. He has habitually eschewed the sacred red slippers and ermine trim of his predecessors. In 2017, Vatican tailors and cobblers who’d been dressing popes for generations told the Catholic news site Crux that Francis’ understated style—his preference for what one might call “papal athleisure”—was throwing them for a loop.

So when an image of Pope Francis dressed in a Jet-Puffed, winter-white, ankle-length hooded down jacket went viral over the weekend, it was understandable that many people thought it was real. A silver cross hung down to his chest. The zucchetto perched atop his head might as well have been a little rolled-up beanie. Plus a puffy coat seems practical; it can get pretty wintry up there in Vatican City. And hey, it’s 2023 and Francis is, after all, the Athleisure Pope. And popes, no matter how frugal, still live in the gilded swag realm that is Roman Catholicism.

The image, of course, was very much not real. It was created by a 31-year-old Chicago man named Pablo Xavier using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator. Xavier told Buzzfeed News that he felt moved to write the Midjourney prompt for the image while he was tripping on shrooms: “I try to do funny stuff or trippy art—psychedelic stuff. It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that,” Xavier said. Afterwards, he posted it on the Midjourney subreddit under the title “The Pope Drip.” 

“It’s just benign enough to be plausibly real,” the Reddit user supervegeta101 commented on the post. “Catholic church is super rich, he’s not as orthodox or old as other Pope’s [sic]… I could see Francis having mad drip.” 

This seemed to be the prevailing takeaway. “What would be the name of the Pope Francis lifestyle brand?” Georgetown policy professor Don Moynihan wrote in a tweet in which he included Xavier’s AI-generated image next to two other (real) photos of the Pope: one where he’s speaking into a microphone with the ruminative gaze of a backpack rapper, and another where he’s autographing a Popemobile-white Lamborghini with a permanent marker. And though we actually do know what it looks like when the Pope wears a winter coat—it’s a double-breasted, peaked-lapel number that blends in with his papal robes—it kinda seems like an Italian craftsperson should tailor-make him a big puffer jacket.

The Vatican has dispelled misinformation about supposed papal drip before, though never in response to a series of AI-generated images. “In the next few years there’s going to be a sweeping assault on reality, and meaning (i.e. lots of fake images, videos, recordings and texts that are also meaningless, that serve no agenda), and it’s going to be very deranged and disorientating, but also exciting,” writer Dean Kissick tweeted alongside the dripped-out Pope photo, which slightly resembles the exaggerated, XXL-outerwear memes created by the Instagram user @itsmaymemes. Fashion and religion, two of Italy’s most influential exports, are each in their own way an incredible tool to interpret reality.