Joe Biden Calling Pope

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About

Joe Biden Calling Pope or Joe Biden Reporting to Pope refers to a series of memes in which U.S. president Joe Biden makes a phone call to Pope Francis to report on various political developments that align with the Catholic faith and benefit the Catholic church as if he secretly serves it. Spawned by a meme about Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022, the format saw continuous prevalence online in the summer of 2022.

Origin

On March 13th, 2015, The White House's official Vine^[1] account posted a clip of Vice President Joe Biden talking on the phone while doing arm curls with a dumbbell, created in support of the Gimme Five Challenge launched by Michelle Obama. The clip (reupload shown below) received over 3.1 million loops prior to the app shutting down in 2016.

Yeah… Yeah… I do a million of these a day, so just gimme five!

On May 17th, 2022, two weeks after Supreme Court documents revealed plans to overturn the Roe v. Wade court case, which made abortion legal nationwide, were leaked, Twitter^[2] user @reallynotm0m0 posted an image from the clip, making a joke about Joe Biden, who is Catholic, reporting to Pope Francis about the upcoming overturning of Roe v. Wade (tweet no longer available, shown below).

Spread

On May 18th, 2022, Instagram^[3] user stonewallism posted a screenshot of the tweet, with the post gaining over 2,300 likes in four months. On May 19th, Twitter^[4] user @limitlessbur copied the tweet, with the repost gaining over 80 retweets and 530 likes in four months.

On June 24th, following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Twitter^[5]^[6] users @Cristero_00 and @EMTVmemes both used the image to make memes about Joe Biden reporting to pope (@EMTVmemes' post shown below, left). The posts gained over 210 retweets and 2,100 likes and 4,100 retweets and 43,300 likes in three months. On June 24th, Redditor^[7] p00t00ass posted a Political Compass meme based on @EMTVmemes' tweet that received over 7,800 upvotes in three months (shown below, right).

In the following months, more viral memes based on the format were shared on Twitter. For example, on September 8th, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Twitter^[8] user @daugherofmarx made a tweet that gained over 5,400 retweets and 47,800 likes in four days (shown below).