“Most Of The Words That Come Out Of My Mouth Are Invalid,” Pope Francis Suggests

Image: Alfredo Borba

Pope Francis said Thursday that the majority of the words that come “spilling” out of his mouth are invalid because most of the time he doesn’t understand that what he says is permanent.

“We live in a culture of the provisional,” the Pontiff said, responding to a question about the “crisis of his pontificate.”

Francis said he often doesn’t comprehend the importance of what he’s saying when speaking off-the-cuff, which he said is “indissoluble.”

“Sadly in today’s pontificate, I don’t understand that what I say will have ramifications for not only my pontificate, but of the many pontificates to come,” he said. “I say something random, and people do not know what it means. And because people listen to me with the philosophy that I am the Pope, they believe I have fully contemplated and formulated what I am saying, which is, in many cases, not the case. This then makes what I say null.”

Francis went on to say that when Catholics have to spend most of their working lives defending what he says, and having to write blog posts or responses to comments on a combox asking if the “pope really said such and such,” clearly there is something invalid in many of the “weird, weird, weird” things that somehow manage to find their way from his brain to his mouth.