By The Pope is a three-panel exploitable image macro featuring a stock crusader whose "Greetings Peasants" line gets interrupted by a middle-panel image, followed by a deep fried reaction panel captioned "By the Pope".

Where did By The Pope come from?

The earliest known post was uploaded to iFunny by user JosephtheGerman, using the crusader template to react to a "REFUGEES WELCOME STOP RACISM!" protest sign.

What does By The Pope mean?

"By the Pope" is the crusader's exclamation of shock in the third panel, an in-character oath that stands in for a stronger reaction to whatever appears in the middle panel.

How do you use By The Pope?

Keep the crusader's greeting panel and the deep fried "By the Pope" reaction panel fixed, and swap the middle panel for whatever you want the knight to react to, often a tweet, screenshot, or sexual image.

Is By The Pope still popular?

By The Pope had its main run from 2016 through 2018 on iFunny, Memedroid, and Reddit, and is best treated as a classic exploitable from that era rather than a currently trending format.

By The Pope

2016image macroclassic

Published August 16, 2026

By The Pope is a three-panel exploitable image macro built around a stock crusader whose greeting to peasants is cut off, then followed by a deep-fried reaction panel captioned "By the Pope." It started on iFunny in 2016 and spread through Memedroid and Reddit as users swapped the middle panel for shocking or absurd content.

exploitable templates multi panel memes ifunny memes deep fried memes stock photo exploitables

Overview

By The Pope is a three-panel exploitable image macro built around a stock photo of a medieval crusader knight1. The first panel shows the knight with the caption "Greetings Peasants, how goes th-," the dash signaling that his line is about to be interrupted. Whatever gets slotted into the middle panel is the joke, and the third panel returns to the same knight, this time deep fried and captioned "By the Pope," to register his shock3.

The format works because the crusader's medieval politeness collides with something the character could never plausibly encounter, from lewd tweets to modern politics. The deep fried final panel amplifies the reaction into cartoon outrage, a visual style that was popular across iFunny and Memedroid in the mid-2010s2.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

iFunny (viral spread on Memedroid and Reddit)

Creator

JosephtheGerman

Date

2016

The earliest known By The Pope post came from iFunny user JosephtheGerman, who used the template to express anti-refugee, nationalist sentiment by placing a photo of protesters holding a "REFUGEES WELCOME STOP RACISM!" sign in the middle panel1. Within roughly two years of being posted, that original entry picked up more than 100 upvotes on the platform3.

The crusader stock image and the specific "Greetings Peasants" opener established the template that every later variation reused, keeping the first and third panels fixed while treating the middle slot as the punchline space3.

How It Spread

Over the weeks after JosephtheGerman's post, iFunny users churned out more variations, most of them swapping the middle panel for something sexual or crude3. On June 18th, iFunny user ByThePope_2016 posted a version in which the middle panel was a tweet about tampon use and menstruation, and the post picked up more than 495 upvotes over the next two years4.

Later that year, on October 5th, Memedroid user JoloJuha posted a variation whose middle panel featured a tweet from a pro-Hillary Clinton furry Twitter account, and it collected more than 1,500 points at a 92% upvote rate5. The format kept traveling: on May 7th, 2018, Redditor MacroMike published a By The Pope edit that swapped the crusader for The Soldier from Team Fortress 2, and the post pulled more than 3,000 points at a 97% upvote rate within three months2.

The cross-platform hop from iFunny to Memedroid to Reddit is what turned By The Pope from an iFunny in-joke into a broader exploitable, though it never left the meme-forum circuit for mainstream platforms3.

How to Use This Meme

To make a By The Pope edit, keep the first and third panels intact: the crusader saying "Greetings Peasants, how goes th-" on top, and the deep fried crusader captioned "By the Pope" on the bottom. The middle panel is where you drop whatever image, tweet, or screenshot you want the knight to be scandalized by, and the sharper the tonal clash with medieval etiquette, the better the joke typically lands.