Cardinal Who Spent Easter Dinner Telling Pope To Ease Off The Butter Feeling Pretty Vindicated

VATICAN CITY—Saying he couldn’t help but think “I told you so” in the wake of the bishop of Rome’s death, Cardinal Giuseppe Betori of Florence confirmed Monday that he was feeling pretty vindicated after having spent all of Easter dinner telling Pope Francis to ease off the butter. “Yesterday I kept telling him, ‘Your Holiness, I can hardly see your mashed potatoes underneath all that butter you’re putting on them,’ but he refused to listen and look where it got him,” said Betori, explaining that he’d repeatedly warned the supreme pontiff that he needed to watch his saturated fat intake because he wasn’t 65 anymore. “I don’t like being right, but I did explicitly tell him that peas stop being healthy when you insist on eating a pat of butter with every spoonful. He probably went through half a stick on the dinner rolls alone. The salted kind, too. It made me gag. He kept saying he needed all that butter to give his body energy to recover from his pneumonia, but we can all see who was right in the end. The way he was wolfing down the stuff, it almost seemed like he wanted to go.” Betori added that Francis really should have known better, having watched Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI die in 2022 after housing four buckets of heavily buttered popcorn.