No, Pope Leo Did Not Give the Vatican’s Highest Honor to Iran |
Yesterday evening, a story exploded across X claiming that Pope Leo XIV had personally awarded the Vatican’s “highest diplomatic honor” to Iran’s ambassador to the Holy See, supposedly in recognition of Tehran’s “efforts to promote peace,” justice, and opposition to warmongering.
The reaction spread as fast as it did because the underlying grievances are all too real—Iran executes converts to Christianity, imprisons and executes activists on a routine basis, and brutally murdered an estimated 36,500 Iranian protesters in just 48 hours earlier this year.
That would have made this story all the more outrageous—had it been true.
The thing is, it wasn’t. One of the earliest red flags about this whole incident was that the only actual media outlets covering this were themselves Iranian state propaganda, including Mehr and PressTV. One potentially AI-generated image of Pope Leo shaking hands with an Iranian ayatollah surfaced with the Islamic Republic News Agency’s logo slapped onto it.
It wasn’t until this morning that we got some clarification on the whole matter, when the US Embassy to the Holy See posted an account that debunked the vast majority of Iran’s framing:
Contrary to news reports, Pope Leo has not bestowed an exclusive special honor on the Iranian Ambassador to the Holy See. This decoration is given to all accredited ambassadors to the Holy See after 2 years of........