What was claimed
Pope Leo XIV said: “To be called ‘woke’ in a world that sleeps through suffering is not an insult, it’s the gospel”.
Our verdict
We can find no evidence that he actually said this. The earliest source we can find says it was “made up”.
Social media posts are attributing a quote about being “woke” to Pope Leo XIV, but we can find no evidence he said this. And the earliest source of the quote that we can find says it was “made up”.
Several posts with thousands of shares claim the new pontiff said: “To be called ‘woke’ in a world that sleeps through suffering is not an insult”. Another post has shared a photo of Leo XIV alongside a longer passage that includes the quote above, as well as other remarks such as “Woke means awakened by compassion”.
The quote has been shared with captions including “Love this pope” and “I'm not religious but I really like Pope Leo’s moral compass”.
However, we could not find any evidence of him actually saying this. There were no results when we searched key words from this passage on the Vatican’s official websites, including transcripts of his recent speeches, or his social media accounts.
Moreover, the unevidenced quote appears to have first been shared on the social media platform Threads on 9 May 2025. The account that shared the quote later posted saying: “I made up these words, with the help of my AI friend.” The same account shared another supposed quote attributed to Pope Leo on the same day, before also saying: “I made the quote”.
Full Fact has contacted both this Threads account and the Holy See press office for comment, and will update this article if we hear back.
One of the posts including the unevidenced quote also uses an old photo of the late Pope Francis, who died on 12 April 2025, not Pope Leo XIV.
We’ve recently debunked other examples of misinformation relating to the late Pope Francis, as well as unevidenced quotes previously attributed to him.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence Pope Leo XIV said this.
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