We came across the following post on Instagram:

The post, with over 7,000 likes at the time of writing is captioned “what do you think?” and includes the hashtag #lgbt, suggesting that the Pope was wearing the colourful cross pictured in support of the LGBTQ+ community. The claim comes shortly after Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust” and said LGBTQ+ people should not be marginalised on 6 February 2023.

When we conducted a reverse image search however, we found that the photographs used by the claim had originally been posted by the Vatican News Twitter page, a Catholic news website that provides multimedia pertaining to the global Catholic Church. The WYD cross mentioned in the tweet refers to the World Youth Day cross, used to commemorate the international event organized by the Catholic Church and focused on faith and youth.

 A second tweet from the news outlet states that the colourful cross is the Latin American Youth Ministry cross with each of its colours represent the various regions of Catholic youth ministries found in Latin America. Yellow represents the Caribbean for example, with red representing the Andes region.

While the LGBTQ+ flag and the Latin American Youth Ministry cross do share some similarities, namely that they are both extremely colourful, the claim that the Pope wore a colourful cross in support of the LGBTQ+ community is false. The cross worn by the Pope was in fact in support of the Latin American Youth Ministry.