No sex please, we’re Catholic. Pope Francis told the world that “sexual pleasure is a gift from God,” but pornography is forbidden. He made the remark in a speech about lust earlier today in Saint Peter’s Square. ‘Winning against the battle of lust can be a lifelong undertaking,’ he said. (Maybe he needs to get the app that House Speaker Mike Johnson uses with his son to monitor each other’s pornography consumption.)
As reported in The Guardian, Francis was obliquely responding to conservative Catholics’ anger over a recently rediscovered book written by the Vatican’s head of doctrine, Víctor Manuel Fernández. Fernández, an “Argentinian cardinal close to Francis, was already known as the author of another sexually charged book written in his youth. The book included a chapter describing the differences between male and female orgasms.” (Fernández now disavows his earlier work, saying, ‘I would certainly not write [that] now.’)
In 2020, the Vatican was thrown in a tizzy when the Pope’s Instagram account liked a photo of a scantily dressed model. From The Guardian:
In 2022, during a talk with seminarians about the dangers of social media, the pope warned against the “devil” of digital pornography, while admitting that priests and nuns also watch online porn. “It is a vice that so many people have. So many laymen, so many laywomen, and also priests and nuns,” he said. “The devil enters from there.”
In late 2020, the Vatican was left in an embarrassing predicament when it was forced to “seek explanations from Instagram” after Pope Francis’s official Instagram, which along with his other social media accounts is managed by a team of people, “liked” a photo of the Brazilian model Natalia Garibotto. The “like” from the pope’s account was visible on Garibotto’s page for several days before being unliked.
The Vatican said at the time: “We can exclude that the ‘like’ came from the Holy See”.
Weeks later, the pope’s account liked another photo of another model in revealing attire. He seems to have a type.
