Pope Francis was not arrested, according to PolitiFact — a nonpartisan fact-checking website owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists.

On Jan. 10, an alternative news website published an article claiming that the pontiff had been taken into custody on Jan. 9 for child trafficking, fraud and other unsavory charges.

“I can categorically deny those outlandish accusations. There is no truth whatsoever to them,” said Rev. Fr. Roger Landry, attaché for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.

The article also alleged that Italian authorities and the FBI were actively investigating the case, and that a mysterious blackout had occurred while the Pope was supposedly being taken into custody (multiple sources living in Vatican City said no power outage had occurred).

No credible media sources picked up the false news, and major social media companies are removing it from their platforms because of misinformation violations.

On Sunday Jan. 10, the Pope live-streamed a scheduled address from the library of the Apostolic Palace, which doesn’t align with the false reports because he would’ve still been incarcerated at that point.

The spread of the fake news came just days after the Pope condemned the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“I was astonished because they are people so disciplined in democracy,” the pontiff told Italy’s Canale 5 news channel in his first public comments on the events. “There is always something that isn’t working … (with) people taking a path against the community, against democracy, against the common good.”

For more to the story, visit PolitiFact.

 

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