‘Gossip is a plague worse than COVID-19’: Pope Francis

Condemning gossip once again, Pope Francis described it as a “plague worse than COVID,” during his Sunday prayers, reported CNN.

He said that the devil is a gossiper who aims to divide the Catholic Church.

“Gossip closes the heart of the community, closes the unity of the Church,” he said.

During his Sunday prayers, the Pope said, “Devil is the greatest talker and he always goes about saying bad things of others. He is the liar who tries to disunite the Church, to alienate his brothers and not to make community.”

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“Please, brothers and sisters, we should make an effort not to gossip. Gossip is a plague worse than COVID-19,” he added.

In 2016, he had warned priests and nuns not to fuel the “terrorism of gossip.”

“Bite your tongue hard if you get an urge to say something against a brother or a sister, to drop a gossip bomb,” he said.

He returned to the topic in November 2018, telling pilgrims in St Peter’s Square that gossip kills “because the tongue kills, like a knife,” according to a statement released at the time by Vatican News, the Holy See’s official press website.

After the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic, the way the Vatican operates has radically changed, forcing the Pope to celebrate Palm Sunday mass in an empty church. After months of lockdown, worshipers returned to St Peter’s Square in Vatican City at the end of May.

Addressing his first public audience since the pandemic on Wednesday, the Pope used the event to call for solidarity in battling COVID-19.