Our Terrorist Pope.

As the old proverb goes: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

One of the many rhetorical flights into low-oxygen realms that the Roman Pontiff has gone on is to condemn gossip.  

Which is welcome and salutary as a general concept.

The problem is he escalates it to a moral plane that undercuts any possible value he may have intended.

In his most ludicrous formulation, he has called it "terrorism," an exercise worse than the murderers of the Shining Path, a thankfully-dead communist organization responsible for more than 31,000 deaths in Peru.

Besides the morally-bankrupt overstatement, here's the problem.

If you glance back over his record, such edicts are a fascinating exercise in self-condemnation: because no one has been a more forthright public gossip than the pontiff.

Especially when he gets chatty with his Jesuit pals or the media.

For example, he recently sat down with a group of Slovak Jesuits and...engaged in gossip.

I can hear the high-pitched outrage from the usual and too-often square-headed cultists from here:

"What?!" 

Why, yes, he engaged in two bits of full-on, chattypants gossip. First, relating an accusation about an unnamed Catholic television organization criticizing him. Naturally, criticism of Number One is "the work of the devil."

That eyeroll aside, here's the thing: we are reliably informed that the pontiff hasn't watched TV since 1990. So he's relaying what he's been told about (Gloria TV? EWTN?) this satanic network...making it simon-pure gossip.

By his own standards, that was worse than the bereaved weeping at the gravesites of those butchered by the Sendero Luminoso. 

And then he followed it up by gossiping about a pair of newly-ordained priests who had (unwisely) asked their cardinal for permission to say the Mass of the Ages. In response, the unnamed cardinal (quite possibly Blase Cupich) told them they had to learn Spanish and then Vietnamese first. 

And no doubt quite-possibly-Blase-Cupich will throw in Esperanto, Romansch, Basque and Quechua if they leap those hurdles. Cardinal QPBC related this pastoral smackdown to the gossiping pontiff who then happily shared it for the whole church to hear.

More terrorism, by the pontiff's own standards.

And let's not forget that he does this sort of point-making gossip as a matter of routine, with Rabbit Mom and slapping about the South African Catholic who introduced him to converts to the Faith.

In this, as with other matters, the giddy bomb thrower from the Vatican should be taken seriously only as a cautionary tale about how not to behave.

Don't forget to include the ridiculed subjects of the pontiff's IEDs in your prayers.