Issuing a warning to aspiring clerics against the “vice” of online pornography, Pope Francis admitted that many nuns and priests, too, watch such illicit content.
The pontiff was speaking at a convention in Rome on Monday, where he was responding to a question about how today’s seminarians are tech-savvy and are immersed in the world of social media.
“It is a vice that so many people have. So many laymen, so many laywomen, and also priests and nuns. The devil enters from there,” he said according to the full text of the event released by the Vatican on Wednesday.
He asked the prospective clergy to make use of the digital tools to “share the joy about being Christian, without forgetting our identity or being too exposed and arrogant”.
“And I’m not just talking about criminal pornography like that of child abuse, where you see cases of abuse in vivo: this is already degeneration. But some ‘normal’ pornography.”
He urged fellow Catholics to delete pornographic material from their phones and resist the “temptation in hand.”
“Dear brothers, pay attention to this,” he said, adding, “Pornography weakens the soul.”
The 85-year-old pope said that he isn’t an active user of Twitter, despite having 64.3 million followers, “because I arrived too late”. A team of people manage his various social media accounts.
In late 2020, the Vatican was left red faced after it emerged that Pope Francis’s official Instagram account liked a photo of a Brazilian model, Natalia Garibotto, following which it sought explanations from the social media app.
The “like” was visible on the photo on Garibotto’s page for several days before being unliked.
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