Pope Francis confesses to bullying a fat schoolboy so badly his furious dad made him apologise
POPE Francis is known to still listen to the confessions of Catholics, but he has now turned the tables to get his own sins off his chest.
The 86-year-old pontiff has made a bombshell admission about a childhood transgression which haunted him throughout his career.
During a lengthy video call with a dozen youngsters from South Asia on Tuesday, he admitted he was once a playground bully.
His Holiness was talking about the prevalence of “body shaming” in today’s society among other topics with students from Catholic universities in India, Pakistan and Nepal.
The pope suggested that social media has spurred the desire to achieve “artificial beauty” as well as the spike in “fat shaming“.
During the discussion, a young woman named Merlin, from India, bravely shared her experience of bullying.
She told Francis that she was teased for being overweight and would cry herself to sleep at night due to the relentless taunts.
The leader of the Catholic church first responded by saying this mentality “is something that is influencing us”.
“We do everything to appear, and not to be. So does body shaming,” he added, according to the Catholic Herald.
Francis then revealed that during his school years, he and his pals had bullied a member of their class for being overweight.
When his father found out about him ridiculing the young boy, he furiously marched his son around to the child’s house to apologise.
The pope attended the Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles school in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Years later, when the pope had already been ordained as a priest, he decided to reach out to his former classmate.
Francis explained he had since become an Evangelical pastor and “had overcome all of his trauma, his bullying, his shame, his body shame.”
The man died recently, but the Pope described their reconnection and being able to see the man’s growth as “beautiful”.
Francis continued: “There is the beauty of the harmony of the individual, regardless of you being fat, thin, short, tall.
“The important thing is to live in harmony, harmony in your hearts.
“Beauty makes us grow in terms of our mental health: every man, every woman, has our own beauty, we only have to learn how to see it, how to recognize it.”
He encouraged those who don’t deem themselves as physically attractive to be “in full harmony with our beauty as a person, as an individual.”
The pope went on to deter the group of youngsters from undergoing cosmetic surgery, saying it “serves no purpose.”
“This beauty is eventually going to fade,” he said.
Francis referred to Italian actress Anna Magnani, who famously vowed to grow old gracefully.
He quoted her iconic line: “Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”
The pope added: “When a woman is pregnant, when she is expecting, her body shape is not beautiful per se, but expecting a child is one of the most beautiful things ever.
“So, it’s not only a question of measurements or sizes, it’s a harmonic beauty that every woman, every man has, and we have to cherish that.”
The video call earlier this week, titled “Building Bridges in South Asia”, was set up by a number of universities.
It was divided into four different sections and the participants were able to take part in a question-and-answer session with the pope.
Francis appeared to be in good spirits after undergoing a three-hour hernia operation in June this year.
It came just as he got into the swing of walking with the aid of a cane after months of using a wheelchair because of a painful knee issue.
He also has suffered from sciatica, a painful inflammation of a nerve that runs down from back to leg.
But he appeared to be fighting fit earlier this month when he met Sylvester Stallone and even shadowboxed with the Rocky star.