Madonna has upset fans and Catholics around the world with her latest Instagram post featuring AI-generated pictures of the Pope.
The Queen of Pop, 66, has a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, having run-ins with multiple leaders, and making her feelings about Pope Francis, 87, clear.
Calling him ‘groovy’ in a 2015 interview and adding: ‘I think we might be able to get together and have a chat about sex’, her recent AI-generated photos of the religious leader may come as no surprise to her most loyal fans, but that’s not to say they haven’t come as a surprise to everyone.
Taking to her social media account on Friday, the Material Girl singer shared two fake pictures, seemingly showing the holy leader, who has served in the role since 2013, getting handsy with her.
In one picture, Madonna can be seen wearing a corset, putting her bust on display, and multiple eye-catching necklaces, with the AI-generated Pope, had his arm wrapped around her waist as he leaned in and appeared to sniff her hair.
She captioned the post: ‘Feels good to be seen…’
A second fake photo shared by seven-time Grammy winner showed her in a lacy black top, hugging the Pope as he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face against hers fondly.
The caption read: ‘Going into the weekend like..’
The pictures were quickly reshared on the social media platform X, with many fans sharing their upset.
vK_Addictor wrote: ‘This is insanely disrespectful and weird and I am not even Christian’. Raja agreed, adding: ‘Using AI to depict Madonna with the Pope raises questions about ethics and respect in digital art.’
Also commenting on the ethics of the post was AJ Abdulraheem who wrote: ‘This is unethical and not good at all.’
However, others found it amusing. Michaelcarreyyyy wrote: ‘She’s so funny for this’. GodisMadonna also weighed in, tweeting: ‘She is so unserious’.
‘She’s so messy, I love her’, Littlebigjuicy added.
Madonna, who was raised as a Catholic, has had a complicated relationship with the Church for most of her life, telling Billboard in 2015 that she had been ‘ex-communicated’ more than once.
The rocky relationship began at the start of her career when she released hits including, Like A Virgin and Papa Don’t Preach, which weren’t favoured by the church.
Upon the release of the latter in 1986, Conservative groups in America believed the lyrics were sending a message of ‘pro-life’, while Planned Parenthood’s executive director at the time, Alfred Moran told the New York Times the song was ‘destructive’.
As for the Church, Madonna controversially dedicated the hit to Pope John Paul II during her 1987, resulting in the Vatican publicly denouncing the popstar and the then-Pope criticising her Who’s That Girl Tour concerts in Italy.
Three years later, in 1990, he urged members of the Church to boycott her Blond Ambition tour.
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The church also requested the popstar’s explicit coffee-table book Sex, which was released in 1992, be shunned by the public and catholic groups shared their upset at her use of religious symbols during The MDNA Tour in 2012.
Despite being publicly denounced, the award-winner has returned to her Catholic faith many times throughout her career and often uses or draws from religious imagery in her works.
Speaking to the Irish Independent in 2015, she described her faith, explaining: ‘I don’t affiliate myself with any specific religious group. I connect to different ritualistic aspects of different belief systems, and I see the connecting thread between all religious beliefs.’
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