“It’s not like he came out and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Pope Leo XIV, he/him,'” Colin Jost jokes of the Chicago native
Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update addressed the election of Robert Prevost as the first American pope, and the subsequent complaints from some conservatives that the Chicago native is somehow “woke.”
Colin Jost began by admitting that, as a Catholic, he “could not be more proud.”
“Which is a sin, and now I’m ashamed,” he joked.
“The Vatican has selected Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost from the south side of Chicago to be the new pope,” Jost continued, as a photograph showed on screen of Pope Leo XIV waving at the crowd in St. Peter’s Square after his ascension Thursday. “You can tell he’s from the south side because he’s got his hands up.”
Jost later turned to MAGA sphere complaints about the new pope having criticized Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the administration’s hardline immigration approach.
“I also love that conservatives are already complaining that this pope is too woke. How woke can a 69-year-old man from Chicago be?” he said. “It’s not like he came out and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Pope Leo XIV, he/him.’”
“The reality is there are no woke catholics,” Jost added. “If you’re a woke Catholic, you’re just not Catholic anymore.”
Later in the segment, co-anchor Michael Che riffed on Donald Trump wanting to reopen the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in order to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
“President Trump said he was interested in reopening Alcatraz because it represents something ‘horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable and weak,’” Che quoted–“which are also his nicknames for his five children.”
