Yesterday’s naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV our first confirmed gamer pope.
Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. “First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing,” Prevost said. “Then we do Words with Friends. It’s something to keep his mind off life in the real world…”
OK, so the pope’s love of casual word games doesn’t exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it’s still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.
A new generation
In the recent past, papal interest in video games has usually taken the form of official statements decrying their potential for harm. Pope Francis, for instance, warned in a 2016 speech that young people should avoid spending excessive time on “a sofa that promises us hours of comfort so we can escape to the world of video games and spend all kinds of time in front of a computer screen.” And in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI specifically called out video games “which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality.”