What the Pope Told Me About Politics

Only a handful of times in my life have I witnessed an instance of what could be described as perfect manners, and one of those occurred in Azerbaijan, during a period of three or four days that I spent following Pope Francis around. This was almost a decade ago. He was on some kind of official Vatican interfaith-outreach tour, which involved paying visits to a couple of nations with tiny Catholic populations, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is, of course, a Muslim country. Fewer than a thousand Catholics lived there in 2016, with only about 300 of those being native Azeris. As for Georgia, something like 84 percent of its people belonged to a branch of the Eastern Orthodox faith. These were more openly hostile to the arriving Roman Catholics than the Shiite Muslims in Azerbaijan were. Granted, that may have owed largely to the greater freedom of expression they enjoyed.

We were met at the airport in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, by sizable groups of protesters carrying signs that read “Pope Francis is the Antichrist”; his refusal in 2013, shortly after his election to the papacy, to condemn homosexuality outright — “Who am I to judge?” — was blamed for having freshly stoked a traditional religious enmity. And certain Orthodox priests from the local patriarchate, scheduled to attend the pope’s Mass at a stadium on the outskirts of the city, changed their minds at the last minute and snubbed him.

When I say “perfect manners,” I have in mind a situation in which a person is faced with what seems, in the moment, to be an impossible social predicament, but in which the person is somehow able, through a combination of quick thinking and innate goodness of soul, to improvise a solution. In the case that I observed, the pope was involved in some kind of procession. It was right before the Mass that he celebrated at Azerbaijan’s lone Catholic cathedral, in the capital city of Baku. Late morning, chilly, bright sun. He shuffled down a gravel path toward the church. Walking alongside him was the tall, mustachioed president of Azerbaijan, the authoritarian Ilham Aliyev. As they went, they passed between two groups of people, who were lined up on either side. One group comprised us, the foreign reporters, mostly Italians who covered the Vatican beat, plus a few rogues like me. We all had cameras and notepads out.

On the other side of the path was a military band, playing a marching song to mark his passage. A long row of musicians, two deep. Suddenly came a strong gust of wind. To everyone’s shock, it blew the pope’s cap clean off his head, onto the ground. You know the little white yarmulke-like cap the popes wear? It’s called a zucchetta, after a kind of gourd. The word is related to “zucchini.” The cap is thought to resemble the chopped-off end of such a gourd. Only the pope is allowed to wear a white one. Now his white zucchetta lay there on the gravel. He walked on, as if he had failed even to notice that it had fallen. Perhaps he hadn’t felt it, or he simply did not know what to do. If he were to stop and bend down to pick it up, would that be seen as disrespectful to the pomp and circumstance that the government had arranged to have performed for him? A tense, vibrating moment.

I noticed that one musician, an Azeri trumpeter in the front row of the band, appeared especially vexed. As he blew into his horn, his eyes danced a triangle, from the pope’s bare head, to the cap on the ground, to us on the other side of the path, the press, with potentially unfriendly scrutiny in our eyes. I was captivated by the trumpeter’s anxiety. This was a dictatorship, after all. In my imagination, he feared some punishment for this embarrassing scene, which he could already see replayed on television, described in the papers …

With an abrupt and suitably military motion, he dropped his horn to his side. He stepped into the path, directly behind the pope. There were a couple of gasps, including one from my own body. It was so irregular to approach the papal person in this fashion. Weren’t there snipers somewhere? The man bent down sharply, snatched up the zucchetta and then, most incredibly, placed it directly onto the Holy Father’s head. It was like something you’d do for a child, put the little hat back on. The pope reacted the same as when the cap had been blown off to begin with, which is to say not at all. He just kept walking, slowly, stooped. The trumpeter took three steps backward, into his position, lifted his instrument and resumed blowing. I turned to the woman beside me. We grinned at each other in relief and amazement.