BONO AND THE POPE: A CLARIFICATION

Back just after the death of the Pope, Bono made some onstage remarks which we thought were slightly opaque; they seemed to be rather warm for a bloke whose watch had helped create the Aids crisis which Bono was supposedly attempting to solve on his other face; the comments suggested we were being a bit harsh and U2's frontman wasn't so much heaping on praise as just gently patting on the head. Well, Bono has been talking about the Pope again, and we're not entirely sure our interpretation of his stance was wrong in the first place:

“He seemed to be starring at me,” Bono recalled of their meeting. “I wondered was it the fact I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offence.”
However it seems the frail Pope had other ideas. “When I was introduced to him he was still starring at them,” the singer added. “He kept looking at them in my hand so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he’d just given.”
At this point the U2 man received a lesson in showmanship.
“Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine,” said Bono. “He was a comedian. His sense of humour was completely intact… I thought ‘Wow! The Drop The Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the front page of every newspaper!’"

... not much inlcination there to even suggest that the Pope might have helped make the problems of debt-ridden nations far worse in the first place by ensuring that as many people as possible were spiritually bullied into not using condoms, thereby robbing the countries of large swathes of the economically active just at a point when their medical infrastructures were struggling to cope. No, The Pope's main contribution to third world debt issues - in Bono's estimation - was he wore a pair of Lynn's Mum's cataract glasses. Boy, did we have him wrong.

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