Welcome to another edition of the Pressbeat Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 kHz. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Pope Leo XIV — history’s most improbable pontiff and certainly its most stylish — delivered his latest pronouncement from the heart of Paris on Saturday, September 26, 2026. But if you thought another platitude about love and mercy was coming, think again.
The central theme was clear enough: interdicted practices. Everything the Pope touched with his words came away half-blessed, half-condemned. Wars, he said, are bad. No one could have guessed that. Famine, similarly, is not good. Bold. Revolutionary. The kind of observation that makes journalists reach for their third espresso.
But then — and here is where things get interesting — the Pope turned to the young people. Specifically, he told them to avoid masturbation. Not merely “be careful with it.” Not “moderation in all things.” No: avoid. A full retreat from a practice that, apparently, can damage both the brain and the heart. The Pope did not elaborate on the mechanism — whether this is a chemical damage or a spiritual one, we are left to decide — but his tone carried the weight of someone who has personally witnessed the consequences.
To the young girls, his advice was equally specific and slightly bewildering: avoid even touching their own breasts. “Let them remain untouched,” he said, almost tenderly. The medical rationale, if one can call it that, remains unexplained. Is this a warning against self-obsession? A broader metaphor for female independence? You decide.
And then he struck at fitness itself. Young women, he declared, should strive to live their lives looking like boys — plain, unathletic, gloriously unremarkable. The suggestion was direct: avoid the fitness clubs. “A toned body is a distracted soul,” he seemed to say, if one reads between his carefully curated ambiguities.
But it was not all pronouncements on bodily discipline. In a surprise pivot, the Pope declared his support for face recognition technology — specifically as a means of granting access to certain websites. Which websites? He did not say. When Vanessa Blake, your own Carter-Wilson Publishing on-site reporter, pressed him in the courtyard with the question — What sites, Your Holiness? — he made the sign of the cross and left.
No further word. Just the cross. And silence.
Which websites does he mean? The Vatican archives? Instagram? Pornhub? Or something as yet unknown entirely? He did not clarify, and she did not follow up. Some mysteries, it seems, are best left unsaid.
Reporting from Paris, for the Wall Street Journal, Pressbeat and WCWP 1575 New York — this is Ami Carter Wilson.
