The news that punk rock musician Patti Smith would perform at the Vatican’s annual Christmas concert in Rome in December 2014 was greeted with some rejoicing. However a wide assortment of believers and non-believers, of punk fans and critics, questioned Smith’s audacity and Pope Francis’s invitation. How dare she?, they asked outright. How dare he?, they implied. I wondered why Christians and atheist or agnostic music devotees, who typically agree about little, were upset about the same thing. But mostly, I wanted to know why Pope Francis asked and Patti Smith accepted. It was not a pairing I would have expected.
I first found amongst detractors an Italian Catholic lay association, Portosalvo, that publicly denounced an earlier invitation for Smith to sing at a Neapolitan church. They called it “potentially blasphemous” and hinted that the Pope should not welcome Smith to perform, either. Around the same time, American columnist Kathy Schiffer told her Patheos audience that she had scrutinized Smith, hoping that the musician had become a devout Christian. But Schiffer’s search bore no such happy fruit. While a few low-level Catholic church leaders saw Smith’s performance as an opportunity to evangelize the unchurched and fallen-away, Schiffer insisted, “There are many Catholic performers who are worthy of that honor, and the Godmother of Punk is not one of them. In fact, to my ears, her music is screechy bad.” It seemed clear to me that Schiffer’s vision of Christian orthodoxy and aesthetics were offended.
Rock music enthusiasts, journalists, and diehard non-believers were, by turns, amused, confused, or disappointed by the prospect. Some suspected that the report might have been concocted by The Onion as a piece of satire. Vanity Fair imagined that, when the Pope and Smith met, they must have “traded anecdotes about their punk-rock days.” A television producer who admired the alleged atheism of Gloria, the first song on Smith’s first album, Horses (1975), shared his dismay with his friend, The Guardian journalist Vivien Goldman: “And to think I believed her when she sang, ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.’” I decided that this was another example of orthodoxy coupled with aesthetics, this time articulated by fervent believers in a musical culture shorn of religion.
What seemed an odd and unlikely collaboration by the Pope and Patti Smith turned out to be for real – and to have deeper roots than I anticipated. I learned that, with little fanfare, Smith had already sung at the Vatican’s Christmas concert the previous year. Somehow, that first performance went relatively unseen in the excitement and haste of the months immediately following Pope Francis’s election as Bishop of Rome. I then located a photograph of Smith, who wore a dark watch cap over her flowing grey hair, clasping hands with Pope Francis, who was clad in the papal white cassock and zucchetto. They were smiling warmly, familiarly, even, into each other’s eyes in the greeting line on St. Peter’s Square. This was April 10, 2013.
To outside appearances, neither Pope Francis nor Patti Smith was adhering to expected beliefs and artistic taste. So why was Smith on the roster for the Vatican Christmas concert? Getting to the heart of the matter led me to Saint Francis of Assisi, the preacher, poet, and patron of the natural world.
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Rewind to March 14, 2013, the day when white smoke curled up from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel to announce the election of a new Bishop of Rome after the resignation of Benedict XVI. Smith waited on tenterhooks at home in front of her television to learn the identity of the new pope. For a number of years, she had hoped that, someday, there would be “a pope named Francis, who would embrace the idea of disseminating material things […] but becoming close to nature and understanding how important it is to respect the Earth,” she told Amy Goodman in an interview for Democracy Now! When the cardinal previously known as Jorge Bergoglio was presented on the papal balcony above St. Peter’s Square, his name was announced as Francis. Smith was delighted. “I’m not a Catholic,” she told Goodman, “but I still wanted a Pope Francis. […] So I was quite happy because I knew anyone who took on this name was taking on a great mantle of responsibility.”
For his part, Pope Francis chose the saint’s name because the new pontiff found Francis of Assisi to be an inspiring role model. He wrote in his May 2015 encyclical letter, Laudato Si, “I believe that Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. […] He was a mystic and pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself.” The new Pope followed this example by choosing to wear simpler clothing than many of his predecessors, to live in the Vatican guesthouse, not the papal apartments, and to eat common meals with guests instead of feasts cooked for him alone. Laudato Si bears a title taken from a phrase from Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures (c. 1224), which is translated Praise Be to You. The papal letter, subtitled On Care for Our Common Home, quotes Saint Francis’s canticle: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.” Later, Pope Francis writes, “this sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” In the letter, the Pope establishes his own approach to integral ecology, linking it to deeper spirituality, ecological education, and harmonious living with all of creation.
As it turns out, Smith is also committed to a spiritually-grounded integral ecology. She had thoroughly researched Francis of Assisi while preparing for her 2012 album Banga. Her study gave her a sense that he “was truly the environmentalist saint because he called upon the people, even in the twelfth century, to have appreciation and respect Mother Nature,” she told Goodman. In the liner notes for the album, Smith says that, while in Arrezo, Italy, searching for the painting Constantine’s Dream by Piero della Francesca, she discovered connections with the eco-friendly saint. One night, she “had a troubled sleep and dreamed of environmental apocalypse and a weeping Saint Francis.” The song that resulted from this exploration, also titled Constantine’s Dream, traces a history of human exploration and exploitation and eventually weeps with the saint and Sister Mother Earth, who sustains us.
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At the Christmas concert on December 13, 2014, Patti Smith stood humbly on stage at Conciliation Auditorium, backed by a large orchestra. Appearing and sounding nothing like a blaspheming punk rocker, she wore her grey hair in multiple long braids and a cross around her neck. She sang tenderly, hands clasped at her heart, to the audience in Rome:
O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary soul rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
The Patti Smith who sang this hymn before a huge audience was not the same person who rejected Jesus in 1975’s Gloria. It is plain to see in the Youtube videos that she was transformed spiritually and meant every word she sang.
What the Pope saw in Patti Smith, and what the American musician saw in the first pontiff from the Americas, was something that many of us missed as we looked through the lenses of our blind orthodoxies, aesthetic assumptions, and blithe mockery. They saw in each other a fellow pilgrim on the spiritual path, united by a love for a saint who cared for animals and plants as much as people, helped the poor, and perceived divine footprints everywhere. Pontiff and musician were drawn to the saint because of his simplicity and observant detachment, peace and kindness, and his dedication to the way of Jesus. Because of this mutual recognition, the Pope and Patti Smith gave us a glimpse of divine possibility in a cynical and weighted world groaning for change. Listening to a recording of Smith singing O Holy Night for Pope Francis and his guests on that Advent night, I wondered if the spiritual transformation they modeled for us could lift our weary souls to rejoice with them and Saint Francis in a new morning, a new hope.
Shan Overton teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her own writing focuses on spirituality, the arts, nature, theological imagination, and creating a new world together.
