Pope Francis warns of 'terrorism of gossip' as he ends Asian tour
Pope Francis urged Bangladeshi priests and nuns to resist the "terrorism of gossip" that can tear religious communities apart as he brought his Asian tour to a close.
As he has done in similar encounters, Francis told the priests and nuns gathered in Chittagong's Holy Rosary Church on Saturday that he was ditching the eight-page speech that he had prepared and would instead speak to them from his heart.
"I don't know if it will be better or worse, but I promise it will be less boring," he quipped.
And then for the next 15 minutes, Francis drew laughter from the crowd, mixing paternal advice on how to tend to religious vocations with gentle warnings about the havoc that gossip "bombs" can wreak when lobbed in closed religious life.
"How many religious communities have been destroyed because of a spirit of gossip?" said Francis, adding that he was speaking from personal experience. "Please, bite your tongue."
History's first Jesuit pope has frequently lamented the damage gossip can do within the church, where vows of obedience, strict hierarchies and closed communities can breed jealousies and resentment.
It is a message Francis has brought to ordinary parishes riven by divisions and to the top of the Catholic Church leadership. His most famous iteration came in his 2014 Christmas greetings to the Vatican bureaucracy, when he listed the "terrorism of gossip" as one of the 15 maladies his closest collaborators were suffering, alongside "spiritual Alzheimer's" and a "pathology of power".
The Bangladeshi edition was far more jovial in tone. It was a humour-filled end to a tense diplomatic trip that saw Francis maintain public silence over the Rohingya refugee crisis while in Burma, only to address it head on in Bangladesh with an emotional encounter with refugees themselves.
"The presence of God today is also called 'Rohingya,'" he told a group of 16 refugees who travelled to Dhaka from Cox's Bazar, the district bordering Burma where refugee camps are overflowing with more than 620,000 Rohingya who have fled what the UN says is a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Burma's military.
Francis's final event in Bangladesh was a youth rally before boarding the plane for the flight home to Rome.
