SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
We are going to do another story on the new pope, and this one will be a little bit different. Here's the backstory. Once the College of Cardinals entered the Sistine Chapel, my job was to wait and wait and wait. And I'll be honest, at a certain point, the excitement and the novelty of staring at that Sistine Chapel chimney faded just a little bit. But luckily, my colleagues and I discovered the Pope Crave social media account, which was churning out hilarious memes of the conclave. Pope Crave is a play on the wildly popular Pop Crave X account, which dishes celebrity news and gossip. Pope Crave was posting memes of the zucchettos - that's the red caps worn by the cardinals - placed on the seagulls lingering by the chimney - content like that. And once that moment finally happened - white smoke and the announcement of Pope Leo XIV - the internet, especially the Chicago-adjacent internet, exploded with joy, and more memes followed. Joining me now is Susan Bin the co-administrator of the Pope Crave X account. Susan, thanks for coming on.
SUSAN BIN: Of course, thanks for having me.
DETROW: Why did you start this account?
BIN: So I initially started Pope Crave because I watched a film - you might have heard of it - called "Conclave."
DETROW: Oh, yeah.
BIN: As part of my, you know, truly abnormal appreciation for this text because of what it symbolized and its message in the current times we live in. I wanted to create this zine, which is just kind of this DIY, self-published, indie-published project between fans, for fans. And this Twitter account was for that zine. And we just also memed (ph) along to the film during the awards campaign. Like, it's about the zine, and, like, the fandom is why we started this account. We just, you know, naturally pivoted to "Conclave" 2024 to conclave 2025 when it happened.
DETROW: Can you tell us a little bit about how you were gathering all the pictures that you were using on the account?
BIN: Yes. So we would have people making original content, no AI. These memes were made from the heart by actual people all around the globe. Someone said, Pope Crave has an international cadre of papal informants. And it's true. People were making memes on our Discord, and then we would kind of curate or have a list of when to send them out on our Twitter account. And then there were also people sending us content through WhatsApp and DMs, and I was in charge of also then memeifying (ph) them or making them publishable for the Pope Crave Twitter.
DETROW: We were looking at all the stuff coming out on the account, and it was funny to walk by something and then check my computer and see the kind of way that you had kind of drawn on it and stuff like that - like the seagulls and things like that. You mentioned the Discord channel where some of the memes are coming. Can you - I know this can sound like a painfully unfunny question - but can you generally walk us through the process of how you came up with some of these memes?
BIN: We were truly memeing (ph) from the heart and the memeing spirit. I mean, we had a whole watch party and were all watching different chimney livestreams. You got to understand that's how many brains we're looking at this and being like, this is funny. Like, we're looking at these seagulls. We can do something. And, you know, we also had Pope Cravers on the ground giving us, like, actual content, and we were like, oh, this is funny. Let's do something with this. So it's just you bring together a bunch of really neurodivergent, queer, funny people, and we're going to be very funny.
DETROW: Can I ask about your personal connection to Vatican art? You're an expert - my producer Tyler told me - on papal sarcophagi. Can you tell me more about that?
BIN: When I was in college (laughter), I did study Greek myths on Roman sarcophagi, and that transitions into the repurposing of this iconography into early Christian art, which then is going to transition into papal sarcophagi. And the professor I studied under - one of them is, like, an expert in old St. Peter's and new St. Peter's Basilica. And so my work kind of - when I was doing it, involved this recordkeeping of the papal sarcophagi from old St. Peter's and their locations and etc., etc. - like, boring stuff that I care a lot about. But just so you know, like, I have always been interested in Vatican aesthetics, Vatican iconography, Vatican pageantry.
DETROW: Susan, can I tell you something?
BIN: Sure.
DETROW: That answer just now entered my top five most NPR public radio ever answers that I've gotten, so congratulations.
(LAUGHTER)
BIN: OK. I'll put that on my LinkedIn.
DETROW: That is Susan Bin, the co-administrator of the Pope Crave X account. Thank you so much.
BIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF VOLKER BERTELMANN'S "POSTLUDE OF CONCLAVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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