POPE DECLARES BINGO ON CHRISTMAS A MORTAL SIN!
A Pedo Pope post.
You tell your mate his new jumper looks really good on him, and hear the sentence leave your mouth a half-second too late. You add a disclaimer nobody asked for. It makes everything worse, and the silence in the pub agrees. It's Friday, ten to five, and the deploy has just started. You sit there with your hands pressed together, staring at a progress bar, negotiating with forces you stopped believing in around the second year of university. The group chat is arguing about something enormous and pointless. Someone types a joke just on the wrong side of the line, then three more messages of "obviously joking", which only prove they weren't. Nobody replies for a while. Easter weekend arrives. The chocolate eggs have been in the shop since early January, you've eaten two already, and you're now expected to feel something about the holiday itself. You pray the shops still have the good ones. **Why it caught on:** the picture shows an elderly man in white vestments and a white skullcap, hands pressed together in front of him, and the label refers to the child abuse scandals that damaged the Catholic Church's reputation. It spread as a ready-made backdrop for deliberately edgy captions: religion jokes, "no homo" gags and crude jabs at whoever was in the news that week. It lasted because the pose, calm, pious and faintly smug, suits almost any caption that is too rude to say out loud.