ROME — Pope Francis warned this weekend against gossip as the most destructive vice that can afflict a Christian community.
Gossip “is the most serious disease in a parish community,” the pontiff told a group of young people Saturday. “Gossip is always used as a tool for climbing, getting ahead, self-promotion: dirtying the other so that I can go further.”
“Please, gossip is not Christian, it is diabolical because it divides,” he continued.
“Be careful, you young people, please. Let’s leave this for spinsters,” he added.
“Never gossip about someone else,” the pope insisted. “And if you have something against somebody else, go and say it to his face; be a man, be a woman: to their face, always.”
“Sometimes then you will get punched, but you have told the truth, you have said it to their face with fraternal charity,” he proposed. “Please, hidden criticism is the devil’s thing.
Francis has often had harsh words for gossip, suggesting earlier this year that it is Satan himself who promotes “gossip and idle chatter” to drive people apart.
The devil often uses this strategy; he “stokes impatience and self-pity, and with self-pity the need to blame others for all our problems,” he said in June. He “makes us edgy, suspicious, querulous.”
“Envy is the door through which the evil spirit enters,” Francis asserted. “The Bible tells us this: by the envy of the devil, evil entered the world. So never be envious!”
While the Holy Spirit leads us to love, concretely, in the here and now, the evil one “encourages gossip and idle chatter,” he said. “Idle chatter is a nasty habit; it destroys a person’s identity.”
The pope’s strongest critique of gossip came in 2016, however, when he called it a form of “terrorism.”
“Whoever gossips is a terrorist,” Francis said. “He is a terrorist in his own community. It’s as if his words were a bomb that he tosses at this one or that one, and then walks away. This destroys! Whoever does this destroys, like a bomb, and then walks away.”
“If you are thinking of saying something against a brother or sister, of throwing a bomb of gossip, bite your tongue! Hard! There is no place for terrorism in the community!” he exhorted.
There may be plenty of things worth criticizing in a community, but there is a right way and a wrong way to remedy them, and gossip or backbiting is the wrong way, he proposed.
“Gossip is worthless,” he added.
“If you throw the bomb of gossip into your community, this is not being a neighbor: this is going to war!” he said. “It divides people, provoking distances and anarchy in the community.”