Mother Teresa never said that... and John XXIII didn't cry all day after reading the Third Secret either ...

He thought it was the Octave of Pentecost and not Ordinary Time.

For years I have heard religious people insist that Mother Teresa condemned Communion in the hand ... turns out she didn't.  In fact, she once asked Fr. Rutler to set the record straight:

Mother did not want to be invoked in polemics. No sentimentalist, she ordered me to write a correction for a newspaper that had reported that she opposed Communion in the hand. - Crisis

Here are some more things Blessed Teresa never said: Quotes falsely attributed to Bl. Mother Teresa.

People make stuff up, or at best, exaggerate things they've witnessed or heard repeated by others.  They repeat it as if it were dogma - even if and when it contradicts what the Bishops have said or permitted.  Sometimes lay-mystics even make it part of their message.

Sometimes they repeat these stories to scare people into reverence or to shame and quilt them as bad Catholics destined to have their hands rot off at their wake...

Ever hear the one about the black box everyone would have in their homes through which the devil would enter?  As a kid, I first heard the prophecy attributed to St. Frances Cabrini. Later, after canonization, Mother Seton. I may be wrong, but it might go way back to some unknown ecstatic in the Swiss Alps. At any rate - I've never been able to verify the origins of the prophecy.  Before cell phones and computers, people thought it was the television, maybe before that it was the radio?

I've written about this stuff before.  My favorite  was from Fatima promoters before the Third Secret was revealed:  "Pope John the XXIII opened the Secret of Fatima in 1960 and cried all day."  That's not what happened.  He didn't share it with Khrushchev and Kennedy either.

The other one, Pope Paul VI wept on Pentecost Monday, when he realized there was not going to be an Octave of Pentecost any more. A bishop stated it as fact in his memoirs.

Then there is the report of what JPII supposedly said in 1980 at Fulda about the Third Secret of Fatima. It was roundly disputed at the time that he even said it - now it is claimed to be historically accurate. Oddly enough, Bl. John Paul never read the contents of the secret until after the 1981 assassination attempt. Yet the Fulda statement continues to be circulated as true.

I bet there are many sayings attributed to Padre Pio which may also be made up.  Pious people often make the mistake of accepting these statements as having more weight than Magisterial teaching and instruction.  They willingly believe a locutionist over proper ecclesial authority regarding the discipline of the sacraments.

H/T Mark Shea