The Vatican's Top 10 "Pop Milestones"

By Richard Owen

Rome, Feb 16 : It seems unlikely that the Pope, known for his love of Mozart and who once described rock music as the work of the Devil, enjoys Carlos Santana’s Black Magic Woman or Oasis’s Wonderwall on an iPod in the privacy of his study.

Yesterday, however, the Vatican gave its imprimatur not only to Santana and Oasis, but also to the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, U2, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac in a list of approved pop albums published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

Last year the Vatican advised the faithful which films to watch, finding merit even in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. This year, because Europe faced a season of mediocre songs at music festivals, the newspaper explained, it was time to recommend an antidote in the form of classic pop milestones.

The Holy See’s top ten includes the 1982 album Thriller by Jackson, the video for which shows the late singer as a zombie dancing with other ghouls in a graveyard, and Pink Floyd’s meditation on time, death, mental illness and consumer greed, The Dark Side of the Moon.

The Beatles also make the list with Revolver, perhaps their most drugs-influenced, psychedelic album from 1966. In the song Eleanor Rigby Father McKenzie writes “the words of a sermon that no one will hear”.

Also given approval is U2’s album Achtung Baby from 1991, on which Bono sings in Acrobat: “I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in.”

As for Oasis, the Gallagher brothers — “Enfants terribles of the working class”, the newspaper said — had given the world a “jewel produced by torment” in their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory.

The article by Giuseppe Fiorentino and Gaetano Vallini, who recently wrote that Bono was a “true crusader for Christianity”, said: “To single out ten classic discs to take to a desert island is no easy enterprise.” They had no hesitation, however, in starting with Revolver, “issued by the Fab Four long ago in 1966” and a “point of no return in contemporary pop music”.

L’Osservatore Romano recently absolved John Lennon of his notorious boast that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”, saying that this was “merely like the boasting of an English, working-class lad struggling to cope with unexpected success”.

Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours remained a “fascinating musical soap opera”, the newspaper said. And in 1999’s Supernatural Santana had shown that he was “the only member of the Woodstock generation still at the top”.

The newspaper said that it had not included Bob Dylan — who sang for Pope John Paul II in 1997 at the World Eucharistic Festival in Bologna — partly because his “visionary poetry” had turned “Messianic” after his conversion to Christianity, but also because he inflicted on the world “three-note songs” that “tried the ears and patience of listeners”.

Under Gian Maria Vian, who took over as editor of L’Osservatore Romano two years ago, the newspaper has shed its previously staid image and taken a more open and outward-looking approach.

It praised The Simpsons on the series’ twentieth anniversary, saying that Homer’s religious confusion and ignorance were a “mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith”.

Last summer it praised the film version of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for its depiction of “the eternal battle between good and evil” in the struggle between Harry and Lord Voldemort, despite having earlier criticised the Potter saga for promoting witchcraft.

Last month, however, the newspaper criticised James Cameron’s 3-D blockbuster Avatar as a “sentimental and facile, anti-imperialist and anti-militarist parable” that promoted pantheism. It also said that the Twilight vampire series of books and films amounted to a “moral vacuum with a deviant message”.