Pope Francis has supported lending aid to migrants fleeing violence and persecution, and called turning them away a “grave sin” in August 2024. However, claims that the Italian government retaliated against the pontiff’s comments by “dumping” migrants on the borders of Vatican City are false; photos cited as evidence for the claim are several years old.
“JUST IN: Italy begins dumping migrants at the door of the Vatican City after Pope Francis said it is a ‘sin’ to ‘reject migrants,'” says a November 20, 2024 X post from an account claiming to share satirical content, calling itself the US Ministry of Truth.
The post garnered more than 110,000 likes. The same claim has circulated — without the satire mention — elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Telegram, Gettr and online articles — including in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Arabic and Chinese.
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s right-wing government has taken a hardline stance against irregular migration from North Africa, including by launching a scheme to process certain arrivals in Albania.
Authorities have also cracked down on not-for-profit rescue organizations saving migrants in the Mediterranean despite admitting that the NGO boats pick up only a small minority of arrivals.
In August, Pope Francis described efforts to repel migrants as a “grave sin” and called for “safe and legal” routes for migrants and asylum seekers to seek aid.
“It must be said clearly: there are those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel migrants. And this, when done with awareness and responsibility, is a grave sin,” he said at a weekly audience on August 28.
Old images
The images used in the posts supposedly showing migrants moving into Vatican City are over half a decade old.
A reverse image search of one image of an aerial shot of a crowd in Saint Peter’s Square reveals it was taken on June 5, 2013, by Associated Press photographer Andrew Medichini during one of Pope Francis’s public audiences (archived here).
Another image of people queuing outside the Vatican’s Janiculum walls, which surround the city, has appeared on various websites since at least 2016 (archived here and here).
AFP journalists in Rome who regularly report on events in Saint Peter’s Square, including during a papal audience on November 20 when the false claims began circulating, have not observed Italian police transporting migrants to the area.
Vatican City’s official news service also maintains a live video feed of the Square, and it shows no evidence of migrants being “dumped” in the city (archived here).
‘Far-fetched’
Silvia Scarpa, the chair of the political science and international affairs department at John Cabot University in Rome (archived here), said the claim is “certainly fake” and that two of Italy’s largest news broadcasters — RaiNews and Sky Italia — have not reported on instances of Italian police transporting migrants to the Vatican.
“If there’s a huge crowd on Saint Peter’s Square, it’s because it’s a tourist area and the Jubilee year is about to start,” she said in a November 22 email.
Maurizio Albahari, a migrant and refugee mobility expert and associate professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University (archived here), said moving irregular migrants to Vatican City is not part of Italian government policy and “will likely never be.”
“The government cannot risk antagonizing Pope Francis in such a crass way, and Saint Peter’s Square is actually patrolled by the Italian police, so it would be a bit of an institutional short-circuit, even before being a diplomatic incident,” he said in a November 22 email.
Vatican City has one of the most stringent residency and citizenship programs in Europe. Although visitors can travel freely between Rome and the Vatican, officials usually only grant citizenship and permission to reside there to government employees, church officials, and their families (archived here).
Pope Francis has transported small numbers of refugees from war-torn regions, including Syria, but they were settled with a Catholic community elsewhere in Rome instead of behind the Vatican’s walls.
Pierluigi Montalbano, the director of the master’s program in migration and development at Sapienza University of Rome (archived here), said by email that he has also not heard of any instances of officials routing migrants to the Vatican and that the posts are “far-fetched.”
AFP contacted the Holy See and the Italian Interior Ministry for comment, but no responses were forthcoming.
AFP has debunked other claims about migration here.
