Pope unwittingly tweets support for NFL team and look, it was bound to happen
When you're gonna use a hashtag in your tweet, always check to make sure it is what you think it is.
Pope Francis, it would seem, did not get that memo.
The head of the Catholic church and the Vatican — or, more likely, one of his team — penned a tweet referencing the five new saints he created at a canonisation ceremony over the weekend.
The Pope used the hashtag #Saints in his tweet, but unbeknown to him, that hashtag was paired with a logo for American football team, the New Orleans Saints.
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On Twitter, the hashtag appears with the fleur de lis emoji beside it, an image which is used as the team's logo, a symbol of the City of New Orleans, and is also often used in association with the Catholic saints of France — so it works both ways.
The team responded on Twitter saying they "couldn't lose after this."
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Saints fans were pretty excited about the accidental shoutout.
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The Saints went on to win their match against Jacksonville Jaguars that very same day, so perhaps the Pope's accidentally #blessed support spurred them on.
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
