The moment the white smoke appeared above the Sistine Chapel, I immediately turned on my television, because I wanted to see who the new pope would be, and then hopped on social media, because I knew that the internet could tell me more about the new pope faster than television could. That, and the memes would be good.

The memes came first, naturally, flying in harder and faster than they ever did with Pope Francis, because the new pope was American. Not just that – Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was from Chicago, with a bio full of cultural touchstones that the American meme economy grasped immediately: Did the pope ever drink Malort? Was the pope a Cubs or a Sox fan? Was God going to intercede on behalf of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs because the pope graduated from Villanova? The next wave of information was, I’d suspected, going to be news and articles about his upbringing, pastoral history and religious stances – things that would tell the world what sort of leader this new pope would be.

And then someone I followed posted a screenshot from an X account with the handle @drprevost: three retweets, over the past three months, that linked to articles harshly cri …

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