What the Pope Told Me About Politics (2025)

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 …