{"id":163,"date":"2008-11-24T08:19:34","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T08:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/11\/vatican-forgives-lennon.html"},"modified":"2008-11-24T08:19:34","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T08:19:34","slug":"vatican-forgives-lennon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/11\/vatican-forgives-lennon.html","title":{"rendered":"Vatican “forgives” Lennon…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"St.<\/span>That’d be John, not Vladimir. (Yes, I know, and it’s Lennon, not Lenin.) And “forgive” would be the hedder on the Reuters version of the story<\/a> about L’Osservatore Romano’s remarkable appreciation of The Beatles on the 40th anniversary of The White Album<\/a>.
\nIt was John who, in 1966 and at the height of the group’s fame, told a London newspaper, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Many were furious, of course–who wasn’t in those days, which are so much like our own. But as the AP version has it<\/a>, the Vatican’s “official” daily was philosophical about the rocker’s claim:<\/p>\n

“The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lennon was also joking, displaying the kind of irreverent irony that was shocking then but which would become the foundation of much of modern discourse, and comedy.
\nPerhaps the bigger question is whether the article in the pope’s paper will prompt any more brow-furrowing inside and outside Rome over the efforts by its new editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, to make the broadsheet a must-read. A recent article by Vaticanista Sandro Magister<\/a> details some of the controversies.
\nRecall that a former archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini, lamented that “no one reads it [l’Osservatore] at the coffee bar!” When Montini became Pope Paul VI, he reportedly wondered about including sports coverage. But the paper actually became more boring after Paul, and, ironically, under John Paul II, who had little interest in it. Left to its own devices, the newspaper became the Vatican version of Pravda, listing official activities of the Holy Father and glowing reports of audiences and texts of speeches. And none of it on line.
\nPope Paul envisioned a newspaper that “does not seek only to furnish news; it intends to influence thought. It is not enough for it to report events as they happen: it intends to comment on them in order to indicate how they should have happened, or not happened. It does not only conduct a conversation with its readers; it conducts one with the world: it comments, discusses, polemicizes.”
\nWell, 40 years later, much is finally changing. Then again, l’Osservatore did not include a critique of these lines of Lennon, from 1971, when he was on his own:<\/p>\n

Imagine there’s no heaven,
\nIt’s easy if you try,
\nNo hell below us,
\nAbove us only sky,
\nImagine all the people
\nliving for today…
\nImagine there’s no countries,
\nIt isn’t hard to do,
\nNothing to kill or die for,
\nNo religion too,
\nImagine all the people
\nliving life in peace…<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Check back in 2011.
\nPS:<\/strong> Extra credit for figuring out which Beatle was Catholic. Over at dotCommonweal<\/a>, Mollie Wilson O’Reilly has the buzz.
\nPrayer Card via this site<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’d be John, not Vladimir. (Yes, I know, and it’s Lennon, not Lenin.) And “forgive” would be the hedder on the Reuters version of the story about L’Osservatore Romano’s remarkable appreciation of The Beatles on the 40th anniversary of The White Album. It was John who, in 1966 and at the height of the group’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,3,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nVatican "forgives" Lennon... - Pontifications<\/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\/pontifications\/2008\/11\/vatican-forgives-lennon.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vatican "forgives" Lennon... - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That’d be John, not Vladimir. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}