CELINE DION UNLIKELY TO BE GETTING ANOTHER PAPAL AUDIENCE ANYTIME SOON

... and even Charlotte Church might find the reception down the Vatican way a little chillier than it used to be. (Oh, alright, she's hardly likely to get as far as Rome airport these days without someone in purple lobbing a bottle of holy water at her and waggling a big cross in her direction). But - surprisingly, when he looks so much like a cabaret singer - the new Pope, Benedict XVI (or Cardinal Ratzinger as he was before he won the top job in a high stakes game of Hungry Hippos this afternoon) doesn't like the rock music:

At the Eighth International Church Music Congress in Rome in 1986, for example, Ratzinger blasted rock music as a “vehicle of anti-religion”. He said rock and roll is a secular variant of an age-old ecstatic religion, in which man “lowers the barriers of individuality and personality” to “liberate himself from the burden of consciousness”. Rock is thus “the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the redemption”.