UnNews:Pope moves into rundown studio flat

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

17 March 2013

Francisco's fucking grim abode.

Just days after announcing that he wanted the Catholic church to become "poor" again, Pope Francis I opted to move into a grim Roman bedsit, just 27 metres (90 feet) square.

The Pope was expected to take over the traditional quarters, the so-called Papal Palace, with its famous series of halls, each more splendid than the last (unless you're walking the wrong way), and the second highest quantity of purple silk and gold found anywhere outside of Prince's caravan in Minneapolis.

However, the one time Jorge Bergoglio surprised his aides by immediately putting the palace up for rent on Craigslist while he himself started looking for the cheapest available places in the arse-end of Rome.

He finally settled on a third floor studio flat in a building with no elevator, situated between a drug rehabilitation clinic and a closed-down bar. He is thought to have signed an illegal contract with the shifty landlord, who called his apartment "cosy" but was rather careful to open all doors gently and slowly so as not to show how they bang into the walls and bits of furniture.

The development has unsettled high-ranking Catholics. A Vatican insider told us: "We tried to tell him, 'Your Holiness, you have no need to seek a new home, you may stay in this palace. It's not yours, it belongs to the church. You can claim a life of poverty whilst sitting on the diamond-encrusted toilet, it's no problem,' but he said that was just bollocks."

"The worst thing now is that the new tenant is Silvio Berlusconi and he's already insisted on dressing up like a pope. It's really going to confuse people."

Sources

• Leverage, "Pope Francis wants 'poor Church for the poor'" BBC, March 16, 2013