Pope Francis told people to “eat whatever you want” during Holy Week, because “the sacrifice is not in the stomach but in the heart”.
There is no evidence the Pope said this. The passage does not appear in any of his annual messages for Lent, or in transcripts of his speeches.
Posts attributing a quote about Holy Week to Pope Francis are circulating on Facebook—but there’s no evidence he actually made the comments which have been shared.
Holy Week in the Christian church is the last week of Lent and takes place between Palm Sunday and Easter.
Lent is the 40-day period of fasting or abstinence in the run up to Easter. Christians believe this represents Jesus Christ’s time spent in the desert without food where he was tempted by the devil.
According to the posts now circulating on Facebook, Pope Francis told people to “eat whatever you want during Holy Week”, because “the sacrifice is not in the stomach but in the heart”.
The message supposedly from the Pope goes on to say: “People abstain from eating meat, but they do not talk to their siblings and/or relatives, they do not visit their parents and do not take care of their children.
“They do not share their food with those who need it most, they distance their children from their father/mother and/or grandparents, they criticize the lives of others, mistreat their partner, etc. Meat does not make you a bad person, just as a fish fillet will not make you a saint.
“Better to seek a good relationship with God by doing good to others. Let us be less arrogant and more humble of heart.”
However, Full Fact can find no evidence Pope Francis ever actually said or wrote this.
The passage does not appear in his annual message for Lent in 2025, or any of his previous messages since he became Pope in 2013.
The theme of the Pope’s 2025 message was “Let us journey together in hope”, and in it he said it “would be a good Lenten exercise for us to compare our daily life with that of some migrant or foreigner, to learn how to sympathize with their experiences and in this way discover what God is asking of us so that we can better advance on our journey to the house of the Father”. It makes no reference to what people should eat.
Similarly, the quote now circulating on Facebook does not appear in any of the English transcripts of speeches the Pope has made during his papal tenure. These are published by the Holy See, which is the government of the Roman Catholic Church.
It is not clear where the passage being shared on social media has come from. We fact checked a similarly worded passage last year, when other fact checkers also found there was no evidence the remarks were made by the Pope.
Full Fact has contacted the Dicastery for Communication, which oversees communication for the Holy See, for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
The Pope is currently hospitalised with double pneumonia. He was admitted on 14 February after experiencing bronchitis symptoms, but is no longer in immediate danger of death and is responding well to treatment, according to the Vatican.
This is not the first time Pope Francis has been the subject of misinformation. We’ve previously written about false claims that he appointed Klaus Schwab ‘universal bishop’, said disabled people should be ‘euthanized’ to fight climate change and called for “urgent depopulation” to save the planet.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence Pope Francis said this.
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