[imagesource: Paul Haring]

At the start of 2020, Pope Francis was being dragged on social media after a video started circulating of His Holiness slapping a woman’s hand on New Year’s Eve.

If he’d waited just three months to do some hand-slapping, it would have been considered a perfectly natural response to someone trying to touch him during a pandemic.

Things have been quiet on the social media front for Francis since that fateful day.

Then it came out that his official Instagram account had “endorsed” a rather risqué post by Brazilian model Natalia Garibotto.

Per The Guardian, The Vatican is now going after Instagram, demanding answers.

The account, it says, did not intentionally ‘like’ the photo, which was posted on October 5, with the ‘like’ still visible on November 13.

It has now been swiftly ‘unliked’.

COY Co, Garibotto’s management company, made the most of the publicity and reposted the image on its own Instagram account last Friday saying the company had “received the POPE’S OFFICIAL BLESSING”.

Garibotto, who has 2.4 million Instagram followers, is also reported to have joked: “At least I’m going to heaven.”

The offending post, for your consideration:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by COY Co. (@thecoyco)

An investigation is underway, and the team that manages the Pope’s account are in the dog box. He rarely composes social media content himself, unless he feels that a situation demands a more personal touch.

“The pope is not like Donald Trump, he’s not sitting around using his phone or computer to tweet all day long,” said Robert Mickens, the Rome-based editor of the English-language edition of the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix.

“He does, for example, approve the tweets – but not the likes – and on very rare occasions he has said he would like to tweet something because of a developing situation or emergency. So he would have nothing to do with this – it’s the communications department, and how this happens … who knows.”

I reckon someone made the rookie error of switching between two accounts on their phone, and accidentally liked the photo on the wrong one.

Who knows who else has received an unofficial Papal Blessing?

The Vatican already spends most of its time trying to mitigate the Pope’s more progressive views.

In a recent documentary Francesco, he referred to gay men and women as “children of God”.

He further noted that “a civil union law” needs to be created so that gay people are “legally covered”.

The Vatican had no choice but to confirm the Pope’s comments but tried to backpedal a little by saying that the church’s doctrine remained unchanged.

[source:guardian]