A lot of things are termed ‘Conspiracy Theory’ in 2021, when in reality they may just be politically inconvenient.
However, some things really are just theories based off of fantasies cooked up in someone’s head. One such theory has emerged since yesterday, claiming that Pope Francis has been ‘arrested for human trafficking’, evidenced from the Vatican ‘going dark’ on its live stream.
The instigator for the spread of this was the Gnostic ‘Q’ conspiracy theory, which alleges possession of secret knowledge about God’s plan residing in a high ranking anonymous pro Trump internet account that regularly teases cryptic and quasi prophetic clues about what is about to unfold. Although some who stormed Capitol Hill last week appeared to be fans of the ‘movement’, for the most part it discourages political action, telling its followers to do things such as ‘trust the plan’ and ‘sit back and enjoy the show’, safe in the knowledge that JFK Jr. would return as Donald Trump’s running mate and that anyone remotely critical of the president was due to be arrested soon as part of anti human trafficking operations.
Unlike 2016’s Pizzagate theory, which revealed many troubling areas of political and celebrity life, questions abound over the origin of QAnon as it served to alienate rather than galvanise much of Donald Trump’s base from 4 years ago. Much of QAnon has also been openly anti Catholic, regularly claiming that the Vatican is heavily involved in human trafficking, all the while endorsing a form of Protestantism that is heavily Evangelical and opposed to Catholicism.
Many Catholics have unfortunately been taken in by this. We know that Pope Francis shoots from the hip, but the solution is absolutely not to listen to American Protestants claiming to have secret knowledge that they cannot and will not share with you except for through their convenient interpretations of cryptic messages from Wizard of Oz style unseen figures behind the screen.
On Saturday 9th January, Trump Attorney Lin Wood shared a story on Parler that ran with the headline:
VATICAN BLACKOUT: Pope arrested on 80 count indictment for Child Trafficking, Fraud
The article was even dumber than the headline, it claimed that charges included:
incest, possession of drug paraphernalia and felony fraud.
The laughable report then stated:
Military officers, Italian police, and their Sex Crimes Unit went to the pope’s home in the Vatican, they arrested him and several other high ranking officials, and placed them all under arrest without incident. People near the scene have reported hearing gunshots, but the Police would not confirm if they were the ones firing the weapons.
This dramatic fantasy then tries to add some credence to its claims:
Pope Francis is currently being held in an unknown prison, being interrogated by Federal Agents working for the state of Italy and Interpol. The FBI is reportedly making arrangements to fly in and interrogate him once Interpol is done with him.
The Vatican is a sovereign state, were the pope to be arrested for something, it would be as likely to be by the Japanese police as Italian.
Despite the preposterous nature of these claims, those reading the article on the Conservative Beaver were willing to believe it. A commenter named ‘YO’ tells us Damn my sources say this is real. Another named ‘D’ piped up , ‘Good news! Sharing with my wife’s family now. MAGA2020!!!’.
Facing obvious criticisms for the stupidity of this article, they have since updated the article, stating:
It appears that Pope Francis tweeted out this morning, however Conservative Beaver has confirmed Pope Francis has a social media team that schedules his posts, and this one was pre-planned. If you click on the tweet, you can see TweetDeck was used to schedule the post.
Pope Francis is still in Federal Custody in Italy, hence, he has not been seen on video. The FBI are enroute for the interrogation, according to sources.
Who invited the FBI? President Trump? We have supported him for his anti war and prolife policies, but he doesn’t even have the willpower to deal with Twitter banning him now, let alone coordinating arrests of world leaders with the FBI (who wouldn’t even have jurisdiction in Italy, let alone the Vatican).
The Conservative Beaver pulled a similar stunt back in December, claiming that Barack Obama had been arrested for links to China.
As for Lin Wood, although he defended Catholic student Nick Sandman after he was smeared by media last year, he himself is an Evangelical Christian, a group hardly known for their affinity towards the Catholic faith.
Regarding the ‘Vatican going dark’, who knows, camera malfunction? Why would it have to go dark for the arrest to take place?
As Catholics, we are not called to like the pope or everything he says, but we are certainly not called to be imbeciles who cannot spot a clearly fake story when we see it. Nor are we called to fall for blatant jokes that got out of hand like QAnon. Don’t sit back and enjoy the show, don’t trust the plan, instead pray to God and do your bit to make the world a better place and to get your soul to heaven, starting by acknowledging that Christ is the one who is the truth, rather than some fantasy psyop designed to alienate you from real life.
Catholic Blogger, The Catholic Traveller, has cleared up the questions about the camera ‘going dark’, which was merely that, a trick of the camera.
To top it all off, here’s a video of the pope himself from the Vatican TODAY.