Free Republic

Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with excrement, Pope Francis said in an interview published on Wednesday. Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly "Tertio" that spreading disinformation was "probably the greatest damage that the media can do" and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin. Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

Islam and Christianity share the "same idea of conquest", and for that reason, Islam should not be viewed as a threat, said Pope Francis in a newspaper interview this week. "It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam," he conceded to the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. "However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest." Ostensibly, the Pope was drawing a parallel between the Islamic "conquest" known as jihad, a holy war or...