{"id":75,"date":"2010-04-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beliefbeat\/2010\/04\/fun-friday-vatican-newspaper-forgives-the-beatles.html"},"modified":"2010-04-16T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-16T07:00:00","slug":"fun-friday-vatican-newspaper-forgives-the-beatles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beliefbeat\/2010\/04\/fun-friday-vatican-newspaper-forgives-the-beatles.html","title":{"rendered":"Fun Friday: Vatican Newspaper Forgives The Beatles"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s most entertaining religion story came out of the Vatican — a nice surprise, considering the significantly less pleasant headlines from there lately. In short, the Holy See’s official newspaper published a glowing tribute to The Beatles, on the 40th anniversary of the iconic group’s schism, forgiving the band for its excesses, including John Lennon’s infamous remark <\/a>that they were “more popular than Jesus.”<\/p>\n

Not everyone got a kick out of this, however: Ringo Starr responded that <\/a>he thinks the Catholic Church has more important things to worry about these days, while the National Catholic Register’s Mark Shea blogged<\/a> that this is both a non-story (backed up by GetReligion<\/a>) and more evidence of an anti-Benedict media campaign. <\/p>\n

So much for Fun Friday! Well, here’s an appropriate song for the occasion:<\/p>\n

<\/embed> <\/p>\n


*Click here to <\/span>subscribe to Belief Beat <\/span><\/strong><\/a>and <\/span>click here to <\/span>follow Belief Beat on Twitter<\/strong><\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s most entertaining religion story came out of the Vatican — a nice surprise, considering the significantly less pleasant headlines from there lately. In short, the Holy See’s official newspaper published a glowing tribute to The Beatles, on the 40th anniversary of the iconic group’s schism, forgiving the band for its excesses, including John Lennon’s infamous…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-media","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFun Friday: Vatican Newspaper Forgives The Beatles - Belief Beat<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beliefbeat\/2010\/04\/fun-friday-vatican-newspaper-forgives-the-beatles.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fun Friday: Vatican Newspaper Forgives The Beatles - Belief Beat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week’s most entertaining religion story came out of the Vatican — a nice surprise, considering the significantly less pleasant headlines from there lately. 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