POPE Francis has said he wants priests and nuns to stop gossiping, during a finger-wagging speech, marking the end of the Year of Consecrated Life (a year celebrating nuns and priests).
“If you get an urge to say something against a brother or a sister, to drop a gossip bomb, bite your tongue! Hard!”, said Francis at the Vatican on Monday.
Pope Francis also remarked on the falling numbers of those willing to enter the priesthood or become nuns, but warned against the Church accepting the wrong types of people.
"Some congregations experiment with 'artificial insemination'. What do they do? They welcome... 'Yes come, come, come'. And then there are problems," he said.
"No. We must be serious about who we take. We must clearly distinguish if it is a real vocation, and help it to grow."
It’s understood there are around 700,000 nuns and 55,000 priests globally, but numbers have been declining in developed countries steadily since the 1970s, as the Catholic church grappled with sex scandals.
However, the number of women entering convents in England and Wales hit a 25-year high in of 45 in 2014, from a base level of seven ten years earlier.
See More: Featured, Pope Francis, The Pope
