Hype has been building on social media around the Catholic Church’s secretive, centuries-old tradition of conclaves to elect a new pope, animating users from the White House on down.
US President Donald Trump on Saturday posted an apparently AI-generated image of himself wearing papal vestments and sitting on a throne, one finger directed to the heavens.
The striking picture was the most notorious among thousands that have bubbled up since the death of Pope Francis on April 21 and ahead of the cardinals’ gathering from Wednesday.
More than 1.3 million tweets have been published on X about the conclave, according to monitoring platform Visibrain, while TikTok videos on the topic have been viewed over 363 million times on the network with unparallelled reach among the young.
Particularly passionate pope-watchers can fire up online game “Mantapa” to pick their favourite cardinals and make predictions for the next pontiff in a style similar to sports betting.
The mystery, pomp and ritual around the conclave — from the opulent Sistine Chapel surroundings to the ethereal black or white smoke signalling ballot results — “lends itself to the narrative formats of social networks” said Refka Payssan, a researcher in information and communication sciences.
“A conclave means both gilt, protocol, ceremony, but also secrecy and mystery” cannily nurtured by the Vatican, agreed Stephanie Laporte, founder of digital strategy consultancy OTTA.
“Young people love to speculate” about outcomes, Laporte added.
“Everyone on social networks has an opinion and everyone wants to decode the news, look for clues, know which cardinal will become the pope. It’s almost like an ‘escape game’,” she suggested.
Payssan noted that the conclave fires up the “curiosity of seeing history happen live”, marking a rare event — the first in 12 years — with potential global consequences.
Even if not Catholic themselves, “young people are very conscious of the pope’s influence on hundreds of millions, even billions of people, whether it’s in his stance on contraception or the environment,” Laporte said.
Conclave fever is also a reflection of the Vatican’s successful turn to digital communications in recent years to build bonds with younger generations.
Created by Benedict XVI in 2012 but mostly used by Francis, the papal X account @pontifex reaches 50 million followers across its nine languages.
And Francis’s own Instagram account had more than 10 million followers.
The Church has backed many cardinals’ own ventures into the digital realm, with some becoming bona fide internet stars.
New York prelate Timothy Dolan has been publishing videos about the run-up to the conclave to his almost 300,000 X followers and 55,000 on Instagram — without giving away any sensitive information.
Moderate Philippine cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle has made his mark online with karaoke videos, tallying 600,000 Facebook followers.
Selfie snapshots are in the mix, with Tokyo’s archbishop Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi posting a photo with colleagues from the bus on the way to pray at Francis’s grave.
Cardinals “are absolutely fascinating personalities who’ve taken their place in pop culture,” firing public enthusiasm for the event, Laporte said.
That fascination has been stoked by pop culture blockbusters like Dan Brown’s novel “Angels and Demons”, adapted for film in 2009, or the acclaimed thriller “Conclave” released this year, based on a book by novelist Robert Harris.
