Pope Francis (Image: Supplied)

Pope Francis, never one to be bound by conventional papal rhetoric, has made a fairly staggering admission — one regarding priests and nuns watching online pornography.

Asked during a question and answer session at the Vatican about the use of social media to “share the joy of being Christians”, the 85-year-old pope drifted onto the subject of “digital pornography”.

Pornography, he said, was “a vice that so many people have… even priests and nuns”.

“The devil enters from there,” the pope told what we can only imagine was a deafeningly silent room of priests and seminarians. “It weakens the priestly heart.”

Pope Francis went on to say “the pure heart, the one that Jesus receives every day, cannot receive this pornographic information”, and advised the group to “delete this from your phone, so you will not have temptation in hand”.

Firstly, we can only assume production of a monastery-themed adult film called The Devil Enters From There is already underway somewhere in the San Fernando Valley.

Secondly, it put us in mind of the pope’s other notable social media contributions. Apart from some fairly standard stuff, reflecting on social media’s ability to foster togetherness and community and concerns about its ability to foment the opposite — toxicity, hate speech, fake news — one particularly germane piece of social media activity from the pontiff stands out.

Back when 2020 was beginning to take the piss with how much weirdness it could cram into 12 months, the Vatican demanded Instagram conduct an investigation into how the pope’s account — which Francis himself does not run, apparently — came to “like” a horny pic (even more horrifyingly, it was schoolgirl-themed) posted by a Brazilian model, known in common parlance as a “thirst trap”.