Meeting the head of your religion would be incredibly stressful for anyone, especially a devout young person. So it's no surprise that sometimes, people's words get jumbled up inside their mouths out of nervousness when talking to the pope. What is bad, though, is when that jumble comes out as an unfortunate slip of the tongue.
The Irish Sun reports that when Pope Francis visited Ireland in 2018, he blessed 500 engaged and married couples in Dublin's Pro Cathedral. Three lucky couples even got to meet him. That's when dairy farmer Denis Nulty — incidentally, the nephew of a bishop — told the pope that he was prepared to commit to "sacrifice of marriage." Of course, he meant to say "sacrament." Talk about Freudian slips. Nulty said afterwards, "It was just the pressure. Nerves. I don't know where the word sacrifice came from. I knew I was going to miss up at some stage though! It was a slip of the tongue."
But Pope Francis, especially, understands how embarrassing mixing up your words at important moments can be, because early on he had a pretty classic mistake of his own. Less than a year into his papacy, while speaking to the faithful in St. Peter's Square, he mixed up the Italian words "caso" and "cazzo." He's not a native Italian speaker, so no big deal? Well, the first one means "example," but the second has various translations, according to NPR, including "a vulgar term for 'penis'" and "f***," all of them inappropriate for a pope.
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