At end-of-year celebrations, some bosses give their employees gifts of appreciation and extend warm wishes. On Saturday, Pope Francis used his annual Christmas message to the leaders of the Vatican’s various departments to admonish them.
Again.
“A church community lives in joyful and fraternal harmony to the extent that its members walk in the life of humility, renouncing thinking the worst and speaking ill of others,” Francis told the cardinals and prelates who make up the Vatican’s administration.
He also touched on a personal bugaboo: gossip.
“Gossip is an evil that destroys social life, sickens people’s hearts and leads to nothing,” Francis said.
For years, Francis has used his Christmas message to the Curia, as the Vatican administration is known, to air his concerns about the workplace environment in the tiny city-state and to urge his top advisers to do some soul-searching.
He opened off-topic on Saturday with a reminder of the devastation of the war in Gaza, in what appeared to be a reference to deadly Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Friday.
“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” he said. “I want to say it, because it touches the heart.”
To be sure, Saturday’s message was far tamer than the one in 2014, when he criticized the Curia for what he called a narcissistic “pathology of power” and “existential schizophrenia.” Warning against a lust for power, hypocritical double lives and a lack of spiritual empathy among some men of God, Francis listed 15 “ailments and temptations” that he said were weakening the Curia’s ability to serve.
In 2018, Francis excoriated “the infidelity of those who betray their vocation” and “hide behind good intentions in order to stab their brothers and sisters in the back and to sow weeds, division and bewilderment.” They resembled Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus but did not repent, he said.
He stayed mum on corruption last year, even though a cardinal who had once been one of the church’s most powerful Vatican officials had been found guilty a few days earlier of embezzlement and fraud in a high-profile case that raised questions about the prevalence of financial malfeasance and incompetence at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church.
This year, Francis returned to gossip, which he has identified as the root of much evil in the church. In a major 2018 Vatican document, Francis said that those who spread gossip “are really the enemies of peace,” and on his travels he has regularly warned priests and nuns to refrain from doing it.
“Do you know what a gossiping nun is like? She is a terrorist,” he told a group of contemplative nuns during a 2018 trip to Peru. “Because gossip is like a bomb. The terrorist, just like the devil, goes in whispering and murmuring, throws the bomb, destroys and calmly walks off. No to terrorist nuns, no to gossip.”
At the end of the audience on Saturday, he gave the prelates two books: one on the important of grace, and the other a reflection on human frailty.
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