Pope Francis has a perfectly good reason for why he took a tumble at a Mass in Poland last week: He was watching Madonna.

Sort of.

“I was looking at [an image of] the Madonna, and I forgot the step,” he said Sunday aboard a plane back to Rome after celebrating World Youth Day.

Francis had been sprinkling incense around an outdoor altar at the Jasna Gora Monastery, in Czestochowa, when he took his dramatic, mid-Mass tumble on July 28.

“I let myself fall, and this saved me, Because if I tried to resist it, I would have gotten hurt,” Francis explained.