“I was ashamed when I heard the name,” The Sun quoted the Pope saying. The name was Mother of All Bombs, as the Americans call their GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast, weighing 21,600lb, which they dropped on an Isis tunnel complex in Afghanistan. It killed 94, the Afghan army said.

“A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother,” the Pope exclaimed while addressing students in Rome. “What is happening?”

Only that the world is now going to hell in very expensively engineered handcarts. As for unsuitable nicknames for weaponry, the atom bomb that killed more than 100,000 at Hiroshima was called Little Boy. “A little boy is the new life in which a mother rejoices,” the Pope might have commented, “and this one gave death.” It was, for what it’s worth, named after a character in The Maltese Falcon played by Elisha Cook Jr – Wilmer – who is called Little Boy by Humphrey Bogart. The bomb that killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki (already a city of Catholic martyrs) was nicknamed Fat Man, after the Sydney Greenstreet character in the film.