According to Italian press reports, Pope Benedict has been raising eyebrows in the Eternal City by making night visits to the residence he kept when known as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:
"At about 9pm a plain, dark car carrying 78-year-old Pope Benedict and his private secretary, Don Georg Gaenswein, swirls out of a side door of Vatican city. It then doubles round in the back streets before arriving at 1 Piazza Citta Leonina, a hall of residence for senior Church figures and the Pope’s home as a cardinal for almost 24 years.
"A Vatican security guard is always waiting in front of the apartments in a pedestrian zone tucked behind St Peter’s Square. The Pope gets out of the car disguised in the plain black priest’s robes he wore when he was the Catholic Church’s senior theologian.
"Wearing a black hat and with his head down, he opens the wooden door himself, as he did for all those years, and tiptoes inside followed by Don Georg.
"’Its is not a question of just dashing in for a few minutes to grab a bag or a book,’ La Stampa said. ‘He spends at least a couple of hours there.’"
Although the Italian press is notorious for its unreliability, which means that the report probably should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, I find myself charmed by the idea of the Holy Father slipping away from the Vatican dressed as a simple priest. It reminds me of his namesake and birthday patron St. Benedict Joseph Labre, who was known as the Beggar of Rome and who used to wander the streets of the Eternal City in a sort of perpetual pilgrimage.
The story also reminds me of the movie “Shoes of the Fisherman” staring Anthony Quinn.
I wonder if he’s going to feed his stray kitty friends on Borgo Pio. He was known to do that every day.