Vatican investigating after papal account ‘likes’ model’s racy photo
A BRAZILIAN bikini model has joked that she is “going to heaven” after a photograph of her in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit was “liked” by the official Instagram account of Pope Francis.
The Vatican has launched an investigation into how the papal Instagram account, Franciscus, ended up “liking” the risqué image of Natalia Garibotto.
Vatican officials s want to know how the embarrassing arrassing endorsement happened, ned, amid speculation that someone meone in the Holy See’s communication steam mayy have accidentally pressed the “like” button while browsing the model’ s extensive gallery of images.
The photograph in question shows
27- year- old Miss Garibotto standing in front of a school locker, wearing a cropped white shirt and a revealing tartan skirt.
“At least I’m going to heaven,” the model wrote on Twitter after receiving the “like” from the Pope’s Instagram account on Nov 13. She also joked: “Be right back, on my way to the Vatican.”
The papal “like” was removed a day later. Pope Francis is highly active on social media. He has 7.4 million followers on Instagram but does not follow any other Instagram profiles.
He is understood to rarely engage in social media himself – that is handled instead by a communications team.
A Vatican official insisted, however, that the “like” had not come from a member of the communications department. He told The Daily Telegraph that the Holy See “has asked Instagram for a detailed explanation”.
But the endorsement – whether inadvertent or not – has done no harm to Miss Garibotto, who has 2.4 million followers. Her management firm made the most of the mix-up, claiming it had received “the Pope’s official blessing”.