The Pope said WHAT?!

The item below has been floating around social media for the last couple of days:

People have reacted with variations of amusement and shock.

But here’s the thing: I can’t find any place where the Holy Father actually said this. 

The mention of Easter right at the beginning is nonsense. Whoever crafted this obviously meant Lent. And the idea evidently was to convince people that fasting and abstinence during Lent (or, er, Easter) are unnecessary — or, maybe, pointless without having a meaningful change of heart.

Here is what the pope has actually said (or written) in his message for Lent 2024: 

It is time to act, and in Lent, to act also means to pause. To pause in prayer, in order to receive the word of God, to pause like the Samaritan in the presence of a wounded brother or sister. Love of God and love of neighbour are one love. Not to have other gods is to pause in the presence of God beside the flesh of our neighbour. For this reason, prayer, almsgiving and fasting are not three unrelated acts, but a single movement of openness and self-emptying, in which we cast out the idols that weigh us down, the attachments that imprison us. Then the atrophied and isolated heart will revive. Slow down, then, and pause! The contemplative dimension of life that Lent helps us to rediscover will release new energies. In the presence of God, we become brothers and sisters, more sensitive to one another: in place of threats and enemies, we discover companions and fellow travelers. This is God’s dream, the promised land to which we journey once we have left our slavery behind.

I invite every Christian community to do just this: to offer its members moments set aside to rethink their lifestyles, times to examine their presence in society and the contribution they make to its betterment. Woe to us if our Christian penance were to resemble the kind of penance that so dismayed Jesus. To us too, he says: “Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting” (Mt 6:16). Instead, let others see joyful faces, catch the scent of freedom and experience the love that makes all things new, beginning with the smallest and those nearest to us. This can happen in every one of our Christian communities.

Words to live by this Lent.

Until someone can prove otherwise, I’m adding that social media post to The FAKE File. It’s getting larger and larger.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to this story about a homily from 2015, which seems to echo a lot of what is in the Facebook post — but with some significant differences:

Real fasting isn’t just restricting food choices. It must also include cleansing the heart of all selfishness and making room in one’s life for those in need and those who have sinned and need healing, Pope Francis said.

Faith without concrete acts of charity is not only hypocritical, “it is dead. What good is it?” he asked, criticizing those who hide behind a veil of piety while unjustly treating others, such as denying workers fair wages, a pension and health care.

Being generous toward the church but selfish and unjust toward others “is a very serious sin: It is using God to cover up injustice,” he said Friday during his homily in a morning Mass celebrated in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where he lives.

Pope Francis said Lent is about fulfilling all commandments both toward God and others, according to reports from Vatican Radio and the Vatican newspaper.

Lent is not about the formal observance of “doing a little whatever” and not eating meat on Fridays while giving oneself free reign to “grow in selfishness, exploit others and ignore the poor,” he said.

There might be someone who thinks, “Today is Friday, I can’t eat meat, but I’m going to have a nice plate of seafood, a real banquet,” which, while appearing to be an abstinence from meat, is the sin of gluttony, the pope said.

Another person might say: “I am a great Catholic, Father, I like it a lot. I always go to Mass every Sunday, I receive Communion,” to which, the pope said he would reply, “Great, and how is your relationship with your workers? Do you pay them under the table? Do you give them a fair wage? Do you contribute toward their pension? To their health insurance and social services?”

Some people may regularly make financial contributions to the church, but, the pope asked, how generous are they toward their loved ones and their dependents? Are they generous and just to them, too, he asked.

People cannot “make offerings to the church on the back of injustice,” he said. “It is not a good Christian who doesn’t do justice to the people who depend on him” and who does not “deprive himself of something essential for him in order to give it to another who is in need.”

“This is the distinction between formal and real,” he said, which Jesus underlined, too, when he condemned the Pharisees and doctors of the law, who adhered to “many external observances but without the truth of the heart.”

This isn’t the same message as the one in that social media post. He’s not letting anyone off the hook (to to speak, all you fish-lovers) to eat what they want.  He’s saying “Don’t think you’re doing enough just because you’re eating fish.”

Don’t believe everything you read just because someone on the Internet told you so. Trust but verify.