THE Nigerian president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and one of his media aides, Bayo Onanuga, have posted images alongside a claim that the president had a dinner in Rome, Italy with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State hours before the inauguration of the newly elected Pope Leo XIV.
Onanuga disclosed this in an X post on May 17, 2025, as Tinubu joined other world leaders for the inauguration ceremony of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State.
His post, shared alongside the two images, read:
“Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State to The Vatican, hosted President Bola Tinubu to dinner some two hours after Tinubu arrived in Rome on Saturday”
Onanuga’s post has generated significant traction on the X platform with over 350,000 views and more than 2,000 likes, over 900 comments with over 600 reposts as of May 19, 2025.
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President Tinubu also shared the same images with similar caption via his official X handle: @officialABAT, though now deleted.
The FactCheckHub observed that the claim was generating controversies online, especially regarding the identity of the cardinal mentioned in the X posts, hence why we verify the images.
CLAIM
Images show the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, with the Nigerian president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
THE FINDINGS
Checks by The FactCheckHub show that the person in the images is not Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, but Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life of the Catholic Church.
President Tinubu attended the inauguration mass of Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, May 18, 2025, at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican City.
To verify the identity of the person in both images, our researcher analysed the images using Google Reverse Image search tool. When he subjected the image to Google search, the results show that the person in both images is Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life, Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, President of the Commission for Confidential Matters, President of the Committee for Investments, as found here and here.
Prior to the inauguration event of Pope Leo XI, Tinubu met with Cardinal Farrell in Rome. The Nigerian president also met with other Catholic bishops and a notable Nigerian opposition figure, Peter Obi at the event.
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Similarly, when our researcher googled the name Pietro Parolin which was mentioned in Onanuga’s X post, the results revealed a different person.
Further checks show that Pietro Parolin is a cardinal and the Vatican’s Secretary of State, as seen here, here and here. Thus, the person Tinubu and Onanuga wanted to mention on the X posts alongside the images is Cardinal Farrell and not Cardinal Parolin.
THE VERDICT
The claim that the images show the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, with the Nigerian president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is MISLEADING; the images show Kevin Joseph Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery of the Laity.
