Vatican asks Instagram to Investigate Pope's 'Rogue Like' On Racy Picture

The Vatican is denying that Pope Francis “liked” a sexually explicit photo on Instagram, and they are so certain it wasn’t him that they are asking the social media giant to investigate how this could have happened.

On Wednesday, the Pope’s Instagram account liked model Natalia Garibotto’s explicit photograph, prompting speculation that Francis had a slip of the thumb while perusing some eye-pluckoutable pictures. It also prompted Garibotto to chortle with glee at her good fortunes of getting the seal of approval, joking: “My mum may hate my a** pics but the Pope be double-tapping” and “Brb on my way to the Vatican.”

In the face of the attention it’s getting, officials from the den of iniquity that is the Holy See are raising hell at the mere notion that the aged Roman Catholic Vizier might have something to do with it, explaining that while Francis does he approves every tweet that goes out, he does not actually send them out, but has a social media team that manages all his accounts.

“We are studying what happened with the help of the competent office at Instagram” said Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican Press office to the Guardian. “We can exclude that the ‘like’ came from the Holy See, and [we have] turned to Instagram for explanations.”

Francis, for his part, usually posts more benign subjects, with the following image being indicative of a typical papal post.

Instagram allows multiple users to be signed into their account on one device, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the social media members gave it the like, rather than other more implausible and nefarious scenarios. Still, from the church that brought us the banquet of the chestnuts, we wouldn’t put anything past these guys.