In class once, I made a disrespectful comment about the pope at the time, John Paul II. I was the only Jewish boy in a Catholic school, and I was sure I’d be given an exemplary punishment.
I was wrong. We were in Rome, the most tolerant place in the world for irreverence toward popes.
Catholics in New York, waiting for Benedict XVI to arrive today in their city, may find this attitude puzzling. But there’s a sonnet by Gioacchino Belli, on the death of Pope Leo XII, that nicely illustrates the Roman’s ambiguous feelings toward His Holiness:
You see the pope’s funeral carriage, he says, weighed down by the magnificence of papal pomp, pass through the city’s narrow streets for the last time. You look at it with a mixture of affection and hostility. You make fun of that grandiose way of dressing, even in death, but at the same time you feel a surge of emotion for that part of you that is vanishing. You then console yourself with the most Roman of sayings: “One pope dies, another is made” ”” sanctioning the eternity of an institution despite the transience of a single individual, the immortality of a city despite the impermanence of its citizens.
Interesting, he thought he was a Jewish boy in a Catholic school. Having a Catholic mother, he would have had an impossible task getting Jews to think he’s Jewish….
This article is in the genre of another concerning Muslim boys in a NY Catholic school in the NYT this week, that caused a comment over at NRO to the effect that the NYT couldn’t wait to publish something demeaning about the Pope and the Catholic Church during his visit. The comment was very apt because as any with a lifetime of NYT-reading under their belt will know, one of its favorite rocks to chip away at is enduring Christian belief and practise, and all institutions that promote and defend it. There is a sub-culture that longs to subvert the power of the Church and serve its own ends, detached from moral absolutes.
This article is quite trivial and hardly more than passing comments reflecting a single opinion. It is far more interesting to know, for example, that at the end of WWII the Chief Rabbi of Rome – a Roman who was Jewish – became a Catholic because of the witness to the faith he had seen among Catholics when his own people were being persecuted.