Pope Francis Supports Initiative To Teach Children How To “Code With Pope”

Pope Francis has backed an initiative that encourages young people to learn coding. The campaign, known as “Code with Pope,” is a partnership with Polish tech entrepreneur Miron Mironiuk of Cosmose AI.

The initiative provides free online coding classes to children aged 11 to 15 in various languages including Spanish, English, Italian, and Polish. The program focuses on reaching out to Catholic-majority countries, leveraging the Pope’s influence to draw participants.

“We believe that the involvement of the Pope will help to convince them to spend some time and use this opportunity to learn programming for free,” Mironiuk says.

After committing to a 60-hour course, students will emerge with foundational knowledge of Python, positioning them to compete in a market where 85 million tech jobs are predicted to go unfilled by 2030.

While Pope Francis has admitted to being “a disaster with machines,” his advocacy underscores the importance of digital literacy in today’s world.

Mironiuk emphasizes the universal necessity of such skills. “Not everyone will be a programmer,” he acknowledges, “but […] should know the basics of programming, because it is a 21st-century skill.”

This isn’t the first time the Pope has engaged with technology to inspire the youth, either.

In 2019, he penned a line of code in a gesture that underscored his message to the younger generation: embrace computer science.