Vatican Makes Peace with The Beatles-Folly or Genius?

This article was originally published by Technorati on 12 April 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

"I read the news today, oh boy!"

The news seems to keep getting worse for the Vatican in terms of its PR posture. First and most important is the on-going child abuse scandal.

Adding to its woes, the editor of the Vatican's weekly newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has decided it's time to make peace with The Beatles.

From the weekend edition: "It's true, they took drugs; swept up by their success, they lived dissolute and uninhibited lives. They even said they were more famous than Jesus. But, listening to their songs, all of this seems distant and meaningless."

For an institution that measures time in millennia, is 44 years that long ago? And here's John Lennon's 1966 quote. Decide for yourself if, from the Vatican's perspective, it ought to be considered meaningless:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Whether The Beatles were more popular than Jesus at the time was a statement of fact with which one could have quibbled. It's the rest of it that still seems a bit troubling from the Catholic perspective.

I'm a big fan of The Beatles, John Lennon, the Vatican and Jesus, and I'm all for making peace, burying hatchets and getting on wherever we can. But with so many other pressing concerns for a Vatican weekly newspaper to report on, its choice to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the dissolution of the band that was more popular than Jesus simply strikes one as, at best, odd.

Unless this is the Vatican's subtle way of rubbing their noses in it; as if to say their music—that which was divinely inspired—lives on, while the band and its members are going the way of all flesh.

Magnanimity, served cold, may be the best form of revenge—and perhaps the only form available to a religious organization.

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This is an interesting 4-minute documentary on the Lennon quote controversy. An interesting quote from this documentary: "Jesus is what he (Lennon) would have liked to have been--but a guitar-playing Jesus."

Photo credit: Zimbio