10 June 26
Olé León Olé
Numenius wrote yesterday about the Pope’s visit to Spain. Unlike him, I’m [still nominally] Catholic. I haven’t attended Mass for years, though this Pope’s fearlessness in criticizing autocracy is inspiring and almost has me wanting to reconnect.
Fr. Massimo Faggioli, who is a professor of Ecclesiology at University College Dublin, was interviewed by France 24 recently and talked about the rock star quality of popes. I was an active Catholic in the early 80s and went by bus from Birmingham University to Wembley to see Pope John Paul II, the first of the rock star popes. (His subsequent authoritarian tendencies and in particular his favoring of Opus Dei soured me on the papacy and on Catholicism in general, and in the United States the church tends to be far more conservative than in the UK, which doesn’t sit well.) But this Pope? Instead of worrying that he’d be eclipsed by Bad Bunny, who was in Madrid (and who my niece flew to Spain to see in concert at the Estadio Metropolitano last week), he decided to meet with him. At the Bernabéu no less. (When asked whether he supported Real Madrid or Barça, he said as Pope, he has to support all teams; as Prevost, he supports Real.) Well over a million people turned out to see him as he celebrated Mass in downtown Madrid.
I’m impressed by the breadth of the program in Spain, by the Pope’s willingness to dip his toe into Catalan which he speaks with a Brazilian accent, by his visiting a jail. By the performance of Sara Baras and the impassioned speech by Antonio Banderas in support of the arts. It’s been quite the trip.
Side note: I’m categorizing this post as “political” because like it or not this visit is highly political in all kinds of ways, not least in putting Trump’s nose badly out of joint again.
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