In early 2026, a rumor spread online that U.S. President Donald Trump called Pope Leo XIV an "insult to Jesus."
Social media posts, largely on Facebook, shared a "fiery sermon" that Leo allegedly delivered in response (screenshot, screenshot, screenshot):
"The president of the United States just said that I insulted Jesus," Pope Leo XIV began. "You want to know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their health care while cutting taxes for billionaires."
And that was only just the start.
"You know what insults Jesus?" he continued. "Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers."
Then he went even further — taking aim at war, corruption, and hypocrisy.
"You know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent school children in Iran and sending our brave men and women off to die in another forever war… Covering up the Epstein files and then refusing to prosecute a single person in them."
Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether the rumor was true.
It was not. This claim appeared to originate from a Facebook account called "Pontiff Leo Era," which claims to be a "news and media website" but is full of content generated by artificial intelligence. Furthermore, search engines, including Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing, returned no credible sources reporting on this supposed attack from Trump and alleged sermon from Leo. If the story were true, reputable news outlets — especially those focused on Catholic news, such as the National Catholic Register — would have widely reported on it.
Thus, we have rated this claim false.
Leo has, however, repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East and said God rejects the prayers of leaders who "wage war" and whose "hands are full of blood" after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prayed for "overwhelming violence" against enemies during a March 25 Christian worship service at the Pentagon. Trump also called Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico's beliefs, including his support of trans people, an "insult to Jesus."
We contacted Pontiff Leo Era to confirm that the account created this story and to ask why the account had made up the false story about Trump and Leo without a disclaimer to note its inauthenticity. We will update this story if we receive a response.
Creators of such content capitalize on social media users' willingness to believe and share the made-up stories, profiting from advertising revenue on external websites to which the posts link. (Snopes has previously reported on the business strategy.)
Many posts spreading the false rumor about Leo and Trump included links in the comment sections to articles on blog sites. The comments promised more details about Leo's supposed sermon in these links. For example, one post promoted an advertisement-filled story that had several indications of AI-generated text, including vague, emotionally charged wording with no details about the time and place where the sermon took place — information that a reputable journalist would include.
Some of the articles also included visual substitutions of certain letters with similar-looking characters from other alphabets. For example, one blog post included the Cyrillic letter "п" instead of the Latin letter "n" in the English alphabet. This is an anti-crawling technique that is often used in AI-generated slop stories to make it difficult for Google and other services to index the blog post.
GPTZero, a tool that aims to detect AI-generated text, said it was "highly confident" that posts shared on social media and blog posts about this claim were generated by artificial intelligence. (These types of AI detection tools are fallible. Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without supporting evidence.)
Snopes has debunked similar rumors before. For example, in March 2026, we traced a false claim that Leo said, "Do not let power turn leaders into kings," in reference to Trump.