Pope to His Haters: Surprise, Bitch
How is His Holiness? “Still alive. Although some people wanted me dead.”
I’m not usually one to adopt stan behavior towards politicians, world leaders, and other public figures, but even I must admit that Pope Francis is on fire lately, and not in a burning-in-purgatory sort of way. In the span of just one short Reuters article about the pontifex maximus’s health following a recent colon surgery, His Holiness clapped back at his Hell-bound haters three separate times with a rhetorical verve I would normally associate with a rapper or a Real Housewife. Here he is, in his own words:
- “Still alive. Although some people wanted me dead,” the pope reportedly replied to a member of the Jesuits inquiring about his health in Slovakia this month.
- “Thank God, I am well,” the Holy Father said, which, if you think about it, is a bit of a flex because if the big man upstairs is personally saving anyone, it’s probably the vicar of Jesus Christ.
- “It is the work of the devil,” the supreme pontiff called Catholic traditionalists’ criticism of the Church.
For an 84-year-old servant of the servants of God, the Pope may actually be kind of metal? At least compared to other Catholic fogeys, who apparently don’t like how Pope Francis has expressed more open-minded — at least relative to what the Church has been working with — views about immigration, climate change, vaccination, and (maybe) gay rights.
But, lest you get carried away and forget that the pope is at his core the old, God-fearing head of an antiquated and corrupt institution, here is a reminder that he is still not “with it” on other issues like “gender ideology”: “It is dangerous because it is abstract with respect to the concrete life of a person, as if a person can decide abstractly at will whether and when to be a man or a woman,” he is quoted as saying.
Less spiritual advice, more serenely spiteful one-liners, please, Father!
