Opinion Pope culture
His appearance on the ‘Rolling Stone’ cover shows Francis Bergoglio must have got some things right.
His appearance on the ‘Rolling Stone’ cover shows Francis Bergoglio must have got some things right.
After gracing the covers of Time, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair Italia and LGBT publication The Advocate, Pope Francis is now beaming amiably upon the world from the cover of Rolling Stone. Last year, the magazine had incensed patriotic Americans by putting Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover.
Its latest cover story on the pope who is modernising and humanising Catholicism confirms their suspicions that Rolling Stone, which was once proud to feature whisky-and-cordite bylines like Hunter S. Thompson, the father of gonzo, fear and loathing, had become a pinko rag. In other words, like the subject of its cover, it must be doing something right.
Perhaps for the first time since the Middle Ages, a pontiff has become an important figure in popular culture. The ministry of John Paul II was a landmark, but this is the first people’s pope, a man who has turned away from the exclusivist tradition of the Roman Catholic Church to throw open the doors of the Vatican, even letting the faithful take selfies with him. Apart from good PR, he is addressing political and moral questions that his predecessors had chosen to evade, and beginning to provide humane answers.
Sexual choice, birth control and divorce have lost all negative connotations in secular life, and the pope is making it possible for the intelligent faithful to respect themselves by not forcing them to respect archaic religious values. This is the basis of his popularity, even outside the church. Pope Francis may never enjoy the numerical superiority racked up in Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan (23 covers), Bono (22), Jimi Hendrix (16) or Jerry Garcia (15), but in the eyes of his god and Jesus, whose popularity is faltering worldwide, even one cover means that something is going right.
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