“The walls of hospitals have listened to more sincere prayers than churches …”. Thus begins a widespread text on the net, attributed – wrongly – to Pope Francis. An authentic hoax, created by some hello who uses the name of Francesco to give strength and authority on the net at a horny and superficial adduel. An emotional song, with a simple and consoling style, which aims to the heart evoking scenes of humanity shared in the hospital wards: the gay doctor who saves the homophobic, the policeman and the prisoner edited in the same room, the Jew who assists a racist. The ending is an exhortation to love, forgiveness, to the essentiality of life. Nothing wrong, apparently, for heaven’s sake. Too bad that It is not the work of the Pontiffdespite being relaunched for months with its signature and even accompanied by religious emojis and hearts. Francesco is another thing. But the paradoxical thing is that it is relaunched – as well as by false brotherhoods – even by authentic faithful and even by some naive parish that falls there.
It is an apocryphal text, repeatedly unmaskedwhich has been running at least since 2023 in different versions, in different languages, with minimal variants but always with the same claim: to believe that it was written by Pope Bergoglio. This is not the case. It does not appear in any homily, speech or official document. And above all, does not reflect the depth, complexity and rigor of Francesco’s thoughtwhich has its roots in the Gospel, in Christian theology, in the social doctrine of the Church and in the Fathers of the Church.
It is the risk – indeed, the paradox – of viral communication: the simpler and reassuring a message, the more it spreads, even if it is false. It happens today as it happened in the Middle Ageswhen the apocryphal texts circulated orally or handwritten, attributed to saints and doctors of the church to give it an authority they had not, transmitted oral form by fake preachers, Cerretans, vagabonds and so on. They were then of edifying legends, popular parables, sometimes naive, sometimes deceptive. Today the network does the sametransforming a text of humanitarian flavor, modest and generic, into an alleged papal reflection, however diminishing the strength of the true Christian message.
Pope Francis does not limit himself to saying “loves more” or “not judging”: his magisterium speaks of social justice, reception, denunciation of the culture of waste, criticism of the economic mechanisms that generate exclusion. His thought is stinging, demanding, rooted in a solid and often countercurrent spirituality, tempered by the experience of the church pastor and for decades of Jesuit studies. Confident with a collage of good feelings is a dangerous operationwhich trivializes faith and empties its prophetic message of meaning.
Attention, therefore: Behind viral tenderness is hidden a false legendlike those that in the Middle Ages created apocrypha saints and miracles never occurred. And perhaps today, as then, we need more than fairy tales.
