Remarking yesterday on Juan Manuel de Prada's rather fierce critique of charity as folly, when it becomes ostentatious as to be nothing short
of theatrical exhibitionism - in reference to JMB/PF's Lesbos foray though he does not say so - I said: "Of course, none of JMB's defenders
would ever think of citing the Sermon on the Mount other than for its first four words, 'Blessed are the poor' that JMB has taken out of context
and made into a slogan. And of course, JMB himself would say, along with his defenders, that he deliberately flaunts his virtues (except that
they cease to be virtues when flaunted) - humility and service, mercy and compassion - in the most theatrical ways possible because he intends
to give the world an example..."
Serendipitously, Sandro Magister's last two posts touch on both aspects of the Bergoglian gestalt - his idealization of the poor, and his
theatrical displays.
Let us consider the first one - which refers to a recent lengthy essay by an Italian professor-scholar of Latin American history, Loris Zanatta,
to explain the Bergoglian obsession with 'the poor' - which is his global translation of the category 'el pueblo', meaning 'the people', who,
in his mind, seem to be made up exclusively of the poor. Because to him, the well-off and the wealthy are not 'people' he cares about -
they are the ones who must be denounced and brought down, whereas, it seems that for him, the middle class simply do not exist.
(He admitted during a recent trip, in answer to a journalist's question, that yes, he has been remiss in addressing them.)
I will take the liberty of reversing Magister's presentation to place the excerpt he cites from Prof. Zanatta's essay, before presenting
how he, Magister, applies Zanatta's points to JMB/PF's actions and actuations. While Zanatta's analysis may explain this pope's more
troubling political moves, it does not excuse them - and of course, they have nothing to do with what troubles orthodox Catholics more,
his religion, i.e., is this pope even Catholic? - or rather, what he is trying to transform Catholicism into - Bergoglianism, which, like
Lutheranism, is one man's personal reading of Christianity that contradicts or betrays many of the most essential teachings of Christ.
Jorge Bergoglio's 'chosen people'
by Loris Zanatta
Bergoglio Peronist? Absolutely he is. But not because he took to it in his youth. He is so in the sense that Peronism is the movement that sanctioned the triumph of Catholic Argentina over its liberal counterpart, that saved the Christian values of the people from the cosmopolitanism of the élite.
Peronism therefore embodies for Bergoglio the healthy conjunction between people and nation in defense of a temporal order based on Christian values and immune from that [. . .] Protestant liberalism whose ethos projects itself as a colonial shadow over the Catholic identity of Latin America.
But then, is Bergoglio populist? Absolutely he is, provided that this concept is properly understood. [. . .] On his major journeys in 2015 - Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay; Cuba and United States; Kenya, Uganda, Central Africa - Francis used the word
pueblo (the people) 356 times.
The pope’s populism is already present in his words. But Bergoglio is less familiar with other words in the political lexicon: he said “democracy” only 10 times, “individual” 14 times, mostly with a negative connotation. [. . .] Are these numbers meaningless? Not so. They confirm for us what could already be guessed: that t
he notion of “pueblo” is the keystone of his social consciousness. [. . .]
His 'people' are good and virtuous, and poverty confers an innate moral superiority upon it. It is in the popular neighborhoods, the pope says, that wisdom, solidarity, values of the Gospel are preserved. It is there that Christian society is found, the deposit of faith.
Moreover, that “pueblo” is not for him a sum of individuals, but a community that transcends them, a living organism animated by an ancient, natural faith, where the individual is dissolved in the whole. As such, that “pueblo” is the chosen people that safeguards an identity in peril.
It is no coincidence that identity is the other pillar of Bergoglio’s populism; an eternal identity impervious to the unfolding of history, on which the “pueblo” has a monopoly; an identity to which every human institution or constitution must bend in order not to lose the legitimacy conferred on it by the “pueblo.”
It goes without saying that this romantic notion of “pueblo” is debatable, just as the moral superiority of the poor is. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to understand that popular communities have, like every community, vices and virtues.
And the pontiff himself acknowledges this, contradicting himself, when he establishes a cause-and-effect relationship between poverty and fundamentalist terrorism; a relationship that moreover is improbable.
But idealizing the “pueblo” helps to simplify the complexity of the world, something in which the forms of populism have no rivals. The border between good and evil will then appear so diaphanous as to unleash the enormous power inherent in every Manichaean cosmology.
This is how the pope contrasts the good “people” with a predatory and egotistical oligarchy. A transfigured oligarchy, devoid of face and name, the essence of evil as the pagan devotee of the God money: consumption is consumerism, the individual is selfish, attention to money is soulless worship. [. . .]
What is the greatest harm caused by this oligarchy? The corruption of the “pueblo.” The oligarchy undermines its virtues, homogeneity, religious spontaneity, like a tempter devil. Seen in this way, Bergoglio’s crusades against it, inasmuch as they emulate the language of postcolonial criticism, are heirs of the anti-liberal crusade that hardliner Catholics conducted a couple of centuries ago.
Something that is not strange at all: Catholic anti-liberalism that on the secular level sympathized with the anti-liberal ideology of the moment, fascism and communism first of all, naturally embraces with ardor today the anti-globalization lingo.
Of course, there is in the history of Catholicism a robust Catholic-liberal tradition, devoted to political secularism, to the rights of the individual, to economic and civil liberty. But such is not the family that saw Francis grow up.
If the sacred college had elected a Chilean pope, who knows, perhaps he would have fished around in that cultural universe. But the Argentine Church was the tomb of liberal Catholics, killed by the wave of national populism. [. . .]
[That wave of national populism was the original Peronism - and it was not the Argentine Church at all that defeated the liberals, it was Peronism, in which Evita Peron's much-heralded visit to the Pope in the Vatican was emblematic of the 'traditional' Catholicism among Peron's 'pueblo' - the same 'pueblo' that Bergoglio speaks of, meaning exclusively 'the poor'.]
In the background, meanwhile,
many things are happening and raising enormous questions on the foundation of Francis’s vision of the world and on the notion of “pueblo” that inspires it; and therefore on its efficacy in restoring to the Church its lost stature. [How can they if the pope himself focuses their attention so narrowly on how to resolve their material needs - and in typical self-contradictory fashion, he says he cannot speak to them of their spiritual needs until their material needs are first met, while on the other hand, thinking they are so pure and virtuous that their very virtue would 'save the Church'. In both cases, he is shirking the primary mission of the Church which is to save souls by leading all men to Christ.]
Modern societies, including those of the southern hemisphere, are ever more articulated and pluralistic.
Speaking of a “pueblo” that preserves its pure and religiously imbued identity is often a myth that does not correspond to any reality.
Continuing to consider the middle classes, growing by the millions and anxious for more consumption and better opportunities, colonial classes that are enemies of the “pueblo,” makes no sense. So many poor of yesterday are in the middle class today. [. . .]
Also on the political level, the forms of populism with which the pope shares such affinity have suffered severe blows, especially in Latin America, so much so as to prompt the suspicion that populist leaders are being orphaned by the “pueblo” that they invoke.
It is no accident that Bergoglio appeared to be disoriented when a journalist asked him for his view on the election of Mauricio Macri as president of Argentina and on the new anti-populist course that some think is beginning in Latin America.
“I have heard a few opinions” - the pope stammered - “but on this geopolitics, at this moment I don’t know what to say. There are a number of Latin American countries in this somewhat changing situation, it is true, but I cannot explain it.”
At first glance he is not an enthusiast of this, considering the rather more secular and cosmopolitan profile of the forces that are coming forward to replace the forms of populism in crisis.
[But he has managed to 'captivate' even the more secular and cosmopolitan elements of society who do not seem to mind his insults because they are always generic and rote - "So what's new? We've heard that since Marx, and we're still here, while Communism has mostly come and gone, and even 'Communist China' chose to go capitalist back in the 1980s!" - that his stock insults have come to constitute nothing more than white noise to the oligarchs and bankers and capitalists whom he never ever names, anyway. In fact, no pope has ever cozied up - or even kowtows - to the world's most prominent oligarchs, bankers and capitalists when he needs them for his own purposes. It's yet another piece in the mosaic of his overall hyprocrisy.]
But it is with these that the Holy Father will have to come to grips.
Adored by the faithful, but he too, may have been orphaned somewhat by his 'pueblo'. [I don't know about that - for now, to JMB, the faithful are his 'pueblo', few of whom are perceptive enough to realize that he is capable of speaking no good of anyone except 'the poor' and whatever his status is in life, a Catholic who is more Bergoglian than Christian, would feel that he is among the pope's chosen people, in which case, he is no better than all the destitute masses and migrant hordes for whom the pope is on a personal Great Crusade. The implications of that in terms of entitlement, as 'chosen people' among Catholics, and as citizens, are mind-boggling.
BTW, how can we trust the good sense of someone whose driving ideology consists of two myths, whose elements he himself often contradicts, and whom everyone else knows to be myths: The myth of 'the people', i.e., 'the poor', being necessarily pure and virtuous; and the myth that his 'chosen people' have an identity that is impervious to the course of history.
What identity other than being poor, which is certainly not impervious to the course of history! Because the phenomenon Bergoglio refuses to recognize is the growth of the middle class across the world in the past two centuries. And what is the middle class but a result of the promotion of the poor by their own efforts? Whatever other 'identity' JMB may choose to read in his chosen people, it surely cannot be identical across all groups regardless of their history and culture!
Zanatta's essay - at least what Magister has excerpted - ends up being far from flattering to JMB and confirms the impression that 1) his impulses are so often objectionable because his motivations and his premises are all wrong!; and 2) he promotes the secular agenda because his ideology is absolutely secular, even if he seeks to dignify it by calling it 'teologia del pueblo'!]
Magister says the excerpt above is but one-fifth of the essay which he recommends as well worth reading in full. But meanwhile, here is how he applies Zanatta's insights...
'The people' as a mystical category
in the political vision of the Argentine Pope
An essay by Professor Zanatta has come out in Argentina and Italy,
on Bergoglio's 'populism' - the thread that ties together his visit to Lesbos and
his affinity for the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization 'popular movements'
by Sandro Magister
ROME, April 20, 2016 – When he encroaches into political territory, Pope Francis blazes new trails.
[No, he doesn't. He simply follows the tried-and-tested path of history's most popular demagogues - advocate the impossible (End poverty. End hunger. End war.) - and make the people share your delusions, at least for a while, until they realize they've been suckered into a con game, but by then, they have been entrapped.] He seeks direct contact, solidarity, with those he sees as victims of the powers in this world, who are also to be the protagonists of a redemption to come.
He does not enunciate programs, he performs gestures that he is the first to acknowledge do not resolve anything. The important thing is that they carry a strong symbolic charge.
In Lesbos, on Saturday, April 16, this is what he did. He let the tears of the migrants wash over him and he brought twelve of them back to Rome with him: three Muslim families carefully chosen - he made sure to clarify - from among those who “had their papers in order,” in agreement with the Italian and Greek states.
[There's a story now that three Syrian Christians had been promised by the Sant'Egidio aides who were responsible for preparing the 'chosen people' for going to Rome with the Pope, but were told on the day itself that there was some technical problem with their papers, which is why only Muslims went with the pope.]
A gesture, therefore, that is
not applicable to the uncontrollable inundation of hundreds of thousands of migrants
sans papiers, but the gesture itself highlighted for the world
the need for a rational management of migration, welcoming but also selective, at the initiative of the host countries, in this case of tiny Vatican City State.
[RATIONAL? Reason by common sense is precisely what is missing in all of JMB's statements and those of his mini-me's in the USA when they talk of welcoming migrants - they want the welcome to be indiscriminate, unlimited and total, heedless of the massive social and economic cost of any such foolhardy scheme, and the rank injustice to the citizens of the host countries who ought to have first call on their government's always-limited welfare resources.]
Here is where Francis stops. He leaves it to the governments to develop the necessary policies - in his words - “of welcome and integration, of growth, of economic reform.”
[Words are so cheap, but tell that to Greece, Italy, Spain, all the southern European countries that are still basket cases from the 2008 world financial meltdown, or even to Germany, the continent's strongest economy which has not yet realized that the country's desire for cheap labor to keep that economy going has made her leaders blind to the security risks and immense cultural challenges Germany will have to face with her feckless immigration policy.]
Also in his previous engagements with the migratory phenomenon, in Lampedusa, on the border between Mexico and the United States, in the refugee center where he celebrated the washing of the feet last Holy Thursday, he has always stopped at symbolic acts.
But that does not change the fact that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has his own political vision of the whole, which in other moments of his pontificate he has made manifest to all.
In this, Francis distinguishes himself from his two immediate predecessors. One must in fact go back to Paul VI to find another pope intimately engaged in a precise and organic political plan, in his case that of the European Catholic popular parties of the twentieth century, in Italy the Christian Democracy of Alcide De Gasperi, and in Germany the Christian Democratic Union of Konrad Adenauer.
When it comes to this European political tradition of 'Christian democracy', which moreover is now obsolete
[a gauge of how profoundly Europe has been secularized], Bergoglio is a foreigner. As an Argentine, his native soil is entirely different. And the political tradition he advocates has a name that has a negative connotation in Europe, but not in the country of the current pope: populism.
That the “pueblo,” the people, is effectively at the center not only of the political but also of the religious vision of Pope Francis is something that he himself has implied a number of times.
During the press conference on the return flight from Mexico to Rome last February 17, one of the moments in which he expresses himself with the greatest spontaneity, he even affirmed:
“The word ‘people’ is not a logical category, it is a mystical category.” [Is it possible that he thinks 'el pueblo' is equivalent to 'the People of God"??? Not that I ever thought of the latter as a 'mystical' category - it's a religious definition, and quite straightforward, nothing mystical about it.]
But the discourses in which he has made manifest in its most complete form his political vision founded on the people are those that he addressed to the anticapitalist and antiglobalization “popular movements” that he convened from all over the world, first in Rome and then in Bolivia:
> To the popular movements, Rome, October 28, 2014
> To the popular movements, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, July 9, 2015
To these key texts can be added the speech of November 27, 2015 on the outskirts of Nairobi, with the exaltation of the native “wisdom found in poor neighbourhoods”:
> To the poor of Kangemi, Nairobi, Kenya, November 27, 2015
The two meetings in Rome and Santa Cruz were attended, in his capacity as “cocalero” activist, by president of Bolivia Evo Morales.
Who was again invited to Rome, a few days ago, as a speaker at the conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the social encyclical of John Paul II “Centesimus Annus,” together with fellow populist leader Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, neo-Malthusian economist Jeffrey Sachs, and the far-left Democratic candidate for the American presidency, Bernie Sanders:
> Sanders, Morales, Correa, Sachs. Il quartetto che piace tanto al papa
And on this occasion the pope received Morales in audience and was also keen to meet briefly with Sanders, on the very morning of the departure for Lesbos, afterward seeing himself repaid with extensive public praise:
> Bernie Sanders embraces Catholic social teaching at Vatican, echoing Francis' cry against indifference
On Bergoglio’s populist streak,
www.chiesa took stock last summer in these three articles in close succession:
> From Perón to Bergoglio. With the People, Against Globalization (12.9.2015)
> Political Ecumenism. With the Technocrats and Anti-globalists (21.9.2015)
> When Bergoglio Was Peronist. And He Still Is (26.9.2015)
On the Peronist sympathies of the young Bergoglio, there is interesting news in a book published in Argentina in 2014 by two journalists in close contact with the pope, Javier Cámara and Sebastián Pfaffen, now on sale in an Italian edition supplemented with new information:
> J. Cámara, S. Pfaffen, "Aquel Francisco", Raíz de Dos, Córdoba, 2014
> J. Cámara, S. Pfaffen, "Gli anni oscuri di Bergoglio", Ancora, Milano, 2016
But on the populism of Pope Francis an essay has been published in recent days, in Argentina and Italy, by a specialist on the subject, Professor Loris Zanatta, who teaches the history of Latin America at the University of Bologna and whose last book, from 2015, the fruit of twenty years of study, published in Italy by Laterza and in Argentina by Editorial Sudamericana, is entitled: “La nazione cattolica. Chiesa e dittatura nell'Argentina di Bergoglio”:
In Italy Zanatta’s essay is in the latest issue of the prestigious secular magazine of culture and politics “il Mulino” and can be acquired as a pdf:
> Un papa peronista?
While in Argentina it is in the latest issue of the Catholic magazine “Criterio” and can be read here in its entirety:
> Un Papa populista
The essay was translated into Spanish by none other than the director of “Criterio,” José Maria Poirier, a leading figure of Argentine Catholicism and a longstanding acquaintance of Bergoglio, who when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires participated regularly in the weekly editorial meetings of the magazine.
In an interview with Alejandro Bermúdez for a book published in the United States shortly after the conclave of 2013, Poirier said:
"Bergoglio is essentially a political man, in the classical sense of the word. Meaning, one has the impression that he has studied all the scenarios. Bergoglio knew what to do if he had to withdraw and retire; Bergoglio knew what to do if he had to continue as archbishop of Buenos Aires; and – why not? – he had also thought about what to do if they elected him pope."
Curtain’s up!
Showtime at the Pope’s theater
Lesbos and Lampedusa. Holy Door and washing of feet. Briefcase in hand when boarding his plane.
How Francis is enacting the pedagogical theater of the seventeenth-century Jesuits
by Sandro Magister
ROME, April 15, 2016 – Pope Francis must be given credit for an extraordinary theatrical flair, like a Jesuit of his order's golden age.
His appearance on Saturday, April 16, on the island of Lesbos, the landing shore for migrants on the Aegean Sea, will have a formidable impact on the global stage. The program for the day is sparse, but there will be nothing to explain and theorize. The setting will suffice. No one could improvise this kind of stage.
As in Lampedusa at the dawn of his pontificate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is re-inventing for the modern-day global village the pedagogical theater of the Society of Jesus of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
That sacred baroque theater had its rules of spectacularity. It required a great deal of application from the actors and the public. With Bergoglio it is different. His performances are of extreme simplicity, designed to capture the screen immediately, of reaching all.
The imposing Catholic liturgy of Holy Week he now concentrates into a single gesture, the washing of feet. Which with him becomes the video news of the day, condensed in the image of the pope with basin and smock, stooping down to the floor, washing and kissing the feet of lowlifes in prison, of refugees in reception camps, of Catholics and unbelievers, Muslims and Hindus, prostitutes, transsexuals. He has done so four times already, and each time with different characters in different places, making every performance a debut.
[And has thereby debased not just the Holy Week liturgy but the primary significance of Maundy Thursday and the Lord's Supper from earliest Christian times - to commemorate the institution by Christ of the priesthood and of the Eucharist.
I suppose the very fact that Jorge Bergoglio's 'communion for everyone' policy in Buenos Aires - which he has begun to formally impose on the universal Church by the openings to sacrilegious communion he has made possible with AL - indicates he may think of the Eucharist as NBD (no big deal!): Christ sacrificing himself to redeem mankind is really less important than Christ 'showing his humility and service' by washing the feet of his apostles.
I realize I am becoming petty here, but maybe that is also why he cannot suffer a few seconds to genuflect at the Consecration. That's not worth a 'display' which may not be theatrical but is the proper act of adoration especially at that moment in the Mass?]
With Francis even his Holy Year of Marcy has its principal setting: the Holy Door. In Bergoglio's church and Holy Year, indulgences and purgatory have disappeared, and a modern Luther no longer has anything to protest against.
[But what if the modern Luther is himself the protagonist in all this???]
The pope opened the first Holy Door for his Holy Year not in Rome but in the black continent, in the capital of a Central African Republic in the throes of civil war. He actually did this before his Holy Year of Mercy had formally started on December 8, which is when he opened the holy door of Saint Peter’s Basilica, followed by that of the hostel for the poor outside the train station in Rome.
[I missed reading about that - I thought Holy Doors were only found in cathedrals, i.e., the bishop's diocesan seat. Maybe, in the church of Bergoglio, any door can be declared a Holy Door, but should we then have to ask the bishop to come bless it and open it solemnly???]
On one Friday every month the pope also makes a surprise appearance at a hospice for abandoned elderly people or at a drug rehab center, each time in carefully evaluated places.
These are the gestures of Francis that reach around the world, become viral. At the Fiumicino airport, at his departure for Cuba last September, he wanted to be seen off by the Syrian family that he was hosting at a home belonging to the Vatican, just outside the walls.
[What an inveterate show-off our beloved pope is!]
Then he had his old briefcase brought to him and with this in hand mounted the staircase of the airplane, as he always does. So that everyone may understand that he has no handlers, that he does and decides everything on his own
[OK already, everyone knows and concedes you are the one and only WonderPope, even if you don't write your own papal texts], and in fact there never appears beside him either of his two personal secretaries.
[Is that right? Isn't one of them always riding with him in the Popemobile tours of St. Peter's Square?]
The theatricality of Francis also includes a capacity to conceal that which could hurt his image. Last March 21, the Monday of Holy Week, he received [former French President] Nicolas Sarkozy and his second wife Carla Bruni at the Vatican. And miraculously he kept the news from getting out.
With heads of state and of government, in posed photos, he is very careful to calibrate his smiles, assigning each one the score he deserves.
A grim face with François Hollande, received shortly after France legalized marriage for lesbians and gays.
A gloomy face with the new Argentine president Mauricio Macri, secular and liberal, whose victory was a blistering defeat for Bergoglio.
In Argentina everyone remembers him as a reserved type, always with a serious face.
[Funereal, was how his righthand man and now successor as archbishop of Buenos Aires described him candidly a few weeks after Bergoglio became pope] But as pope, in direct contact with the crowds, he is the complete opposite. It is an explosion of joviality,
so well rehearsed as to appear spontaneous.
[No, that can't be rehearsed! He has said on more than one occasion that he really enjoys being pope. My armchair psychologist's view at the time was that before he became pope, he was not used at all to being the recipient of mass affection - and his instant and phenomenal mass and media appeal as pope must have surprised him enormously that it became impossible for him to ever revert again to his funereal face, so the joviality in public has become second nature, as a reaction to the massive adulation and affection he gets from the public. "They like me - they really like me!" And as the Hispanic saying goes, 'Amor con amor se paga' - Love is repaid with love. How can you be funereal in such circumstances?]
In words as well, he loves to improvise, and is a fountain of anecdotes and quips, which he draws from a repertoire that is not rich but well assorted. He loves to interact with the public. He says a sentence and has the crowd repeat it in chorus once, twice, three times in a row, to fix it firmly in their heads.
[That, too, I've read, is a Jesuit pedagogical technique. Like his penchant for choosing three words to focus on in his formal homilies.]
Right after he was elected pope, he immediately changed his workaday stage. No longer the Apostolic Palace, so suited to the classics of the theater, but Casa Santa Marta, perfect for his improv act.
[That's not strictly true, of course. He still has to carry out the standard set pieces of a pope's routine, as head of the Church and head of Vatican State, within the historically grand official halls of the Apostolic Palace. I don't think he has a choice about that. He may not like it, but there's an international diplomatic protocol in place, especially about visiting heads of state or heads of government that the Holy See may not ignore just because the pope prefers to 'keep everything simple'.
By the same protocol, he cannot tell his host president or king or prime minister that "I really don't want any frills. Let's cut out the airport ceremonies, let's not have these courtesy calls at the presidential residence/king's palace/what have you. Let's just take a ride together in my little Fiat and just have a heart-to-heart talk, then maybe we can both visit your poorest neighborhood together."
I can imagine he might have made some such suggestions to papal trip coordinator and advanceman Alberto Gasbarri way back when, but was told that wasn't possible. Hosts are supposed to put their best foot - and residences and meals and clothes - forward to honor their guests. Goes for the pope, as well, when he is host. Do you think Obama would have been flattered if JMB had received him in one of the reception salons of Casa Santa Marta, and not at the Apostolic Palace?
*****
Allow me this small divertimento:
Speaking of breaking protocol - or innovating on it, in any case - Benedict XVI went out of his way in July 2008 to welcome President George W. Bush and his wife Laura on their second visit to him at the Vatican, midway through Bush's final year as President.
In particular thanks for how the Bushes received him in Washington earlier that year, he arranged to welcome them to the Vatican not in the Apostolic Palace, but in the Torre San Giovanni [A cylindrical tower built in the 14th century atop the westernmost hilltop of the Vatican, it fell into disuse in the 16th century but it was rebuilt by John XXIII. It was intended to be used by illustrious guests (Paul VI made it the temporary home for Hungary's legendary Cardinal Mindszenty in 1971, after he was allowed to leave Budapest, where he had sought asylum from Communist persecution at the US embassy), as well as a temporary home for a pope if circumstances do not allow him to use the papal apartments. John Paul II lived there in 1979 while the papal apartments were remodelled. JPII subsequently had the Casa Santa Marta built in order to make Conclave participants live more comfortably than in improvised cells near the Sistine Chapel as they had to - it was bad enough when there were only 60 cardinals voting but the number has since doubled. It was used for the first time in teh 2005 Conclave.) Benedict XVI stayed in Casa Santa Marta during his first three months as Pope with no ado (though no one seems to remember that at all!) and then in Castel Gandolfo for the summer months, only occupying the papal apartment in September 2005, after it had been renovated for his use (much of it had been converted into an intensive care center to anticipate any possible medical emergencies in the last few years of John Paul II's life). Meanwhile, the Torre San Giovanni has now become the headquarters for Cardinal Pell's Secretariat of the Economy.]
Anyway, after the 'formalities' and pleasantries at Torre San Giovanni, Benedict and the Bushes proceeded to the nearby Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes to pray together and then attended a little 'concert in the park'. The event was probably unprecedented both for a pope and for a US president.
End of divertimento.