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Beware of the Deepfake Magisterium

The use of artificial intelligence to produce fake celebrity endorsements of dubious products is not new and is well-documented, and scores of people have fallen victim to such deceptions.

Real and AI-produced images of Pope Francis and Marc Cardinal Ouellet. (Screenshots courtesy of the author)

Prelates of the Roman Catholic Church have not been silent on the general dangers posed by the misuse of AI. On several occasions last year, Pope Francis offered remarks about the potential misapplication of various AI technologies. More recently, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, revealed that his department of the Roman Curia is working with the Dicastery for Education and Culture to produce a document on the ethical use of AI.

Some may recall the deepfake images of Pope Francis sporting an oversized designer puffer jacket that circulated on social media in 2023. In late 2024, artificially generated images purporting to depict the Pope in the embrace of an aging pop star drew further attention. These instances of deception, however, may seem innocuous compared to some recent AI-generated appropriations of the likenesses of members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

The year 2025 brings a new round of ecclesiastically themed deepfakes with a much higher order of gravity: they cannot be justified as simply jocose. Instead, they have been produced for a distinctly commercial purpose: to promote the sale of a product that—at best—is theologically dubious.

A set of interrelated deepfake video advertisements currently queuing on YouTube features the likenesses of Pope Francis and Cardinal Mark Ouellet, the former Prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops. The deepfake video impersonations of the bishops are used to promote the sale of a mysterious prayer that is claimed to bring extreme wealth and worldly success to those willing to say its words. The 90-word prayer, with a regular price of $179, can be accessed by viewers for the newly discounted price of $59.

The deepfake portion featuring Pope Francis’s endorsement of the prayer is an AI alteration of a real video. In May 2024, Pope Francis was interviewed by CBS journalist Nora O’Donnell for the news program 60 Minutes. The video of that interview—conducted in Spanish with the help of a translator—has been modified for the convincing deepfake. The altered version features Francis speaking perfectly fluent English, with facial gestures and moving lips that match each uttered word. The embedded 60 Minutes logo in the upper left corner of the original has been covered over in the deepfake with a small emblem featuring the recognizable Christian symbols of a cross and a dove above an open book. In contrast to the Pope’s wide-ranging responses to the journalist’s various interview questions, the content of the deepfake pontiff’s message is singularly focused: it is a crass sales pitch. The deepfake Pope says:

The only thing you need to do to make this happen is to recite the sacred prayer, and then financial blessings will start flowing into your life from every possible direction. If today you need to pay a bill, settle a debt, or simply want more prosperity in your life, the sacred prayer will help you. This prayer is so powerful and so strong that you should only recite it once a day or you might end up attracting too many blessings. Just to help you understand the power of this prayer, it has been kept hidden from you for years because this is the secret that the wealthy use and they don’t want you to discover it.

The deepfake may be visually convincing, but the message is patently a pared-down version of the so-called “prosperity gospel.” The video ends with the AI-Pope telling viewers: “You could start receiving financial blessings as early as today. Click now.”

Even for the ‘Pope of Surprises,’ the content of the video should be sufficiently incongruent to ward off many viewers from parting with their money. But the quality of the deepfake is likely to fool some people. The appearance of papal authority in fundamental spiritual matters—in this case, how to pray—carries much weight. Indeed, the offering of insights on how to pray has been one of the hallmarks of Pope Francis’s pontificate. Many of his General Audience addresses in 2020 and 2021 constitute a thematic Catechesis on Prayer. Furthermore, his Angelus addresses, as well as spontaneous comments over the years, have examined the topic of praying from a variety of approaches.

Cardinal Ouellet is the main character in a pair of related deepfake videos that also promote the same advertised prosperity prayer. Both videos were produced by altering a 2021 Vatican News video by the real Cardinal Ouellet, in which the Prefect had given a two-minute overview of the history and daily work of the Dicastery for Bishops. The deepfakes preserve the setting of the original. On the back wall of the office is a gold-framed painting in the style of Italian baroque artist Giovanni Paolo Panini that features the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica. Behind the Cardinal can be seen the very top of a chair with the pale blue silk damask upholstery of the Louis XIV-style furniture of the Prefect’s office. To the Cardinal’s left is a landline office phone.

The setting of the original and the two deepfakes are the same, but the messages conveyed are certainly not. In the two deepfake videos, no mention is made of the work of the Dicastery. In the first, the AI-Cardinal begins by addressing the viewer directly, indicating that merely viewing the video is the special result of providence. The viewer is instructed that untold wealth awaits:

Don’t skip this video. God wants to speak to you. He has chosen you. If you’re watching this video, it means you’ve been chosen to receive unexpected money. A large sum so big that you can share it with everyone you love. […] But if you’re watching this video, you’ve been chosen for this. So, feel special. Today, you have the chance to change your entire life. To access the 60-second prayer and understand all about how it works, all you have to do is click on the Learn More button. You will be redirected to a video where I explain everything.

This deepfake is visually convincing. If a viewer follows the instructions and clicks to watch the second video, the promised “explanation” of the route to wealth takes a very different tone. This AI version of Cardinal Ouellet addresses the viewer in an exceedingly intimate and personal tone:

Yes, my child. The time has finally come. I know how much you pray, how often you ask God for help for a miracle. And know this, that moment has finally arrived. Believe me, you’re not seeing this video by chance. You didn’t end up on this page by coincidence. God has been watching over you since the day you were born. He has been by your side since your very first breath. He was there when you took your first step, had your first sip of milk and shed your first tear, and He loves you deeply.

The danger of these deepfake videos featuring Pope Francis and Cardinal Ouellet is not only the financial loss incurred by vulnerable people who spend the $59 in this apparent spiritually-themed get-rich-quick scheme. Another harm is that they arguably depict high-ranking prelates inducing viewers to engage in internet-age simony. The sale of spiritual goods has a long and ignoble history; the act of simony as chronicled in Acts 8 now has an apparent present-day counterpart in the YouTube advertising queue.

The second video featuring the deepfake Cardinal Ouellet is over 40 minutes long, but the persona of the Cardinal is only presented at the beginning. A female speaker takes over and explains the purported origins of the prayer in a winding account with many tangents. The gist is that the prayer was discovered in 2021 among fragments of “an ancient biblical scroll from 2000 years ago” in the city of Jerusalem.

After a suggestion that the text of the prayer may be a missing page of the Bible, the speaker states that a copy has been preserved in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The speaker then relates that Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the current Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has enlisted her help to share the prayer. Stock footage of a priest is used for Cardinal Pizzaballa, and a screenshot of a Wikipedia page article on him is shown to lend an air of authenticity. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, however, is not subjected to the deepfake treatment given to Pope Francis and Cardinal Ouellet. Nevertheless, his authority is invoked throughout the video with claims about the prayer’s efficacy and the Cardinal’s promotion of the prayer.

The use of artificial intelligence to produce fake celebrity endorsements of dubious products is not new and is well-documented, and scores of people have fallen victim to such deceptions. AI-generated images and videos appropriating the likenesses of influential people are relatively easy to produce. These creations succeed in fooling unsuspecting viewers for many reasons, not the least of which is that not everyone is well-positioned to recognize the deception. The material harm is great; in the United States alone, AI-generated content creates losses of billions of dollars each year from unsuspecting victims.

But with this new round of deepfake videos, the stakes are higher. The purported sale of spiritual goods online is a new take on an old scheme. The history of the church includes popes and anti-popes, and now, AI-popes.


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About M. V. Dougherty 1 Article
M. V. Dougherty holds the Sr. Ruth Caspar Chair in Philosophy at Ohio Dominican University. His recent publications include the book New Techniques for Proving Plagiarism: Case Studies from the Sacred Disciplines at the Pontifical Gregorian University (2024) and a journal article in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly (2024). Visit him online at MVDougherty.com.

11 Comments

  1. For those scurrilous enough to believe religious faith was meant to make them rich they deserve to be taken for a ride [there were and still are TV prosperity theologians].

  2. Should we trust AI-pope if it said:

    “I believe in the entirety of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. I would never use my office to undermine the teachings of Christ in practice.”

  3. Eureka! This deepfake stuff explains the whole Bergoglian papacy!

    The photos of Bergoglio with anti-Catholic mass murderers Biden and Pelosi?

    No pope would scandalize the faithful like that. They are clearly deepfakes.

    The relentless Bergoglian attacks on the ancient Latin Mass which Catholics have been worshiping at for countless centuries?

    Insanity. So they have to be deepfakes, definitely.

    What about those Bergoglian encyclicals that promote sin and confusion and gay everything?

    Again, obviously deepfakes produced by AI.

    And what about the Synod on Synodolatry, with all of its dialoguing and accompanying and undermining of Catholic teachings?

    Deepfakes, deepfakes and deepfakes, all supposed to be attributable to the now obviously fictional Pope Francis.

    Bergoglio’s new deepfaked reality takes moral relativism a big step further — and completely over the edge into the abyss.

    It’s all become suddenly clear. Bergoglio himself is just too improbable, too unlikely — too weird — to be real. He’s obviously a deepfake placed here by the Jesuits.

    Or the Rosicrucians.

    Or the Chinese.

    The great irony here is that the warning against deepfakes is being delivered by a digital figment of our own deepfake imagination.

  4. That’s quite a litany brineyman. A bit misleading. The issue of heresy in the Pope if it is there, is that it is heresy even for a Pope; and we do not wish it on him, rather, that he should be saved from it and that we express our hope in Christ.

    The charge to walk with others and “legalize homosexual civil union” is heretical. Christ walked with disciples to Emmaus to bring to light what it is about Himself He achieved; he did not “walk with” in order to inculcate or foment or justify legalizing sin “as a way to build bridges of reconciliation and so be pilgrims of hope as ‘our ancestors’ were”.

    ‘ And he encourages them to not be afraid “to be protagonists of history,” warning that “if we fail to promote social justice, we will not be able to guarantee the dignity of every person, of every person who comes into this world, of every hopeful young person who sets foot in the Americas.” ‘

    https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-01/pope-to-social-ministry-leaders-be-protagonists-of-the-future.html

  5. Did Pope Francis give his nod or explicit assent to the Obergefell decision beforehand? And is that what he meant when he said, “I stood for this”? What was HE being protagonist about when he “shared” his “stood for” the “legalizing” of “homosexual civil union”?

    I think we have a right to know at least what period of history he is talking about when he admits that he “stood” for it. Even if he was not involved in any way with the Obergefell travesty, it is not the role of the Pope to be legalizing homosexual union or “standing for it”; nor is it the role of the Pope to “admit” that he “stood for” something in the past tense but with a sense that that thing “nevertheless remains as passable”.

    Neither is it the way of the Papacy nor is any Pope appointed for it. Nor is any Pope’s role to be arranging anti-Christ and sinful results while hiding it from the faithful, berating the faithful and inveigling and insulting the faithful to accept blindly the outflow from the unknown machinations working against them and faith.

    We have a right and duty to know what he did concerning Obergefell because that is the obvious natural position obliging ANY Pope in the circumstances to proclaim from the housetops –and his not supporting it. It’s not the way of the faithful to have to keep guessing about the Pope on such matters and/or be used for evil.

    He should also state clearly that he was not involved in Obergefell because the ambiguity in the “stood for” statement carries it in the same frame of delivery. He would have been insisting on parrhesia in the occasion withholding honest dialogue incumbent on his position in the issue; that would be dishonest He would have said “stood for this” to deflect accusation of hypocrisy from those he fears on the different sides; and it is hypocrisy.

    ‘ n January 6, 2016, Alabama’s Chief Justice, Roy Moore, issued a ruling forbidding state officials from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples; he faced ethics charges for this decree in May of that year and was subsequently suspended for the remainder of his term beginning that September. Following Moore’s ruling, the previously listed counties continued to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, while Elmore and Marengo Counties joined in their refusal. ‘

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges

    *****

    ‘ The Pope goes on to express his hope that the CSMG “will become a sign of unity, to ‘build bridges of reconciliation, inclusion, and fraternity”—a challenge he knows they can rise to because, as he explained, “each one of you works very hard to recognize Jesus Christ in those most in need: the excluded, the discarded, the poor, the migrants.”

    Protagonists of history

    After praising the Church in the United States for its focus on concrete reality rather than abstract ideas, Pope Francis recognizes the service of social ministry leaders, which makes possible “a social dialogue that listens and converses ‘with’ the poor, always ‘at the service of the common good’.” ‘

    https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-01/pope-to-social-ministry-leaders-be-protagonists-of-the-future.html

  6. Much of what has been produced by Pope Francis over the last near dozen years would have been regarded as “artificial intelligence” prior to 13 March 2013. In a certain sense it is.

    • You salve his conscience with that or does he salve his conscience with that; or do you salve it together?

      You wish to salve my conscience with that? You say that the Holy Father will salve my conscience with that? with you?

      According to the press the Holy Father also made the claim in public that Benedict had agreed with him about “legalizing homosexual civil union”.

      Trolling Benedict after he passed is “like artificial intelligence”? When the Holy Father said that as reported in the press it means he got it from himself.

      When the Holy Father fails to put it right it is the Holy Father failing to put it right. You speak for the Holy Father?

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