Cardinal's Butter Rub Criticism on Pope Sparks Holy Week Health Revolution

Ever wonder if the Pope might be buttering himself into an early grave? Well, this Easter dinner tale might just churn your stomach—or at least give you pause before reaching for the next pat. Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, feeling as vindicated as a food critic whose dire predictions about a doomed restaurant finally came true, couldn’t resist an “I told you so” moment following Pope Francis’s passing. Was it the butter-lathered peas that did him in, or perhaps the heavily buttered dinner rolls? If food were truly the path to eternal peace, maybe Francis was looking to expedite his journey. Judge for yourself as we dive into the most butter-filled incident in recent Vatican history. LEARN MORE

VATICAN CITY—Saying he couldn’t help but think “I told you so” in the wake of the bishop of Rome’s death, Cardinal Giuseppe Betori of Florence confirmed Monday that he was feeling pretty vindicated after having spent all of Easter dinner telling Pope Francis to ease off the butter. “Yesterday I kept telling him, ‘Your Holiness, I can hardly see your mashed potatoes underneath all that butter you’re putting on them,’ but he refused to listen and look where it got him,” said Betori, explaining that he’d repeatedly warned the supreme pontiff that he needed to watch his saturated fat intake because he wasn’t 65 anymore. “I don’t like being right, but I did explicitly tell him that peas stop being healthy when you insist on eating a pat of butter with every spoonful. He probably went through half a stick on the dinner rolls alone. The salted kind, too. It made me gag. He kept saying he needed all that butter to give his body energy to recover from his pneumonia, but we can all see who was right in the end. The way he was wolfing down the stuff, it almost seemed like he wanted to go.” Betori added that Francis really should have known better, having watched Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI die in 2022 after housing four buckets of heavily buttered popcorn.