So, they’re saying Bob Dylan was “snubbed” by the Vatican’s “official” list of ten great pop milestones …

The Holy See’s top ten includes the 1982 album Thriller by Jackson, the video for which shows the late singer as a zombie dancing with other ghouls in a graveyard, and Pink Floyd’s meditation on time, death, mental illness and consumer greed, The Dark Side of the Moon.
The Beatles also make the list with Revolver, perhaps their most drugs-influenced, psychedelic album from 1966. In the song Eleanor Rigby Father McKenzie writes “the words of a sermon that no one will hear”.

Also given approval is U2’s album Achtung Baby from 1991, on which Bono sings in Acrobat: “I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in.”

As for Oasis, the Gallagher brothers — “enfants terribles of the working class”, the newspaper said — had given the world a “jewel produced by torment” in their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory.

The article [in the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano] by Giuseppe Fiorentino and Gaetano Vallini, who recently wrote that Bono was a “true crusader for Christianity”, said: “To single out ten classic discs to take to a desert island is no easy enterprise.” They had no hesitation, however, in starting with Revolver, “issued by the Fab Four long ago in 1966” and a “point of no return in contemporary pop music”.

[...]

The newspaper said that it had not included Bob Dylan — who sang for Pope John Paul II in 1997 at the World Eucharistic Festival in Bologna — partly because his “visionary poetry” had turned “Messianic” after his conversion to Christianity, but also because he inflicted on the world “three-note songs” that “tried the ears and patience of listeners”.

Well, Giuseppe Fiorentino and Gaetano Vallini are no doubt serious people and devout Christians and Catholics, to be associated with the Vatican newspaper, so I will restrain any over-the-top remarks, and resist my initial temptation to call them a couple of tasteless twits. It’s not that I don’t think some of the things on their list constitute good pop music, but their choices are extremely obvious and uninteresting, and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of thread of significance in the selections for a person of faith (which is presumably a large part of the audience for the Vatican newspaper).

In any case, put aside the details of their list, and the absurdity of even coming up with such a list for the Vatican newspaper. Put aside even how they miss the serious ways in which Bob Dylan’s work has in fact been a light in the darkness of much of much of pop culture for the past fifty years (after all, I’ve written about that before, inspired, funnily enough, by something Pope Benedict wrote about Dylan).

The chief thing that interests me here is instead one of the reasons cited for not including Bob: “partly because his “visionary poetry” had turned “Messianic” after his conversion to Christianity.”

Messianic? What the heck do they mean by that? I haven’t yet been able to find the actual article in an English translation, so I’m stuck for full context. But I honestly doubt that there is any further illuminating context, and I also doubt that Giuseppe and Gaetano really have any idea what they’re talking about. But what could they be trying to say? Usually, when someone is accused of being Messianic, it’s in reference to one’s having a Messiah Complex, i.e. believing that one is a savior of one kind or another. In its genuine and extreme form it’s a symptom of pyschosis. Do Giuseppe and Gaetano think that this comes across from Dylan’s work? Some people certainly used to hold Dylan on a kind of Messianic pedestal in the 1960s, but as we know he rejected that notion of himself as any kind of leader or savior. More to the point, what evidence could there possibly be that after his “conversion to Christianity” he’s become somehow more Messianic, as they indicate? (And how does Christmas In the Heart figure into this scenario? Is Bob perhaps presumed to be singing about himself?)

Or, are they instead using the term “Messianic” as a way of characterizing the specific nature of Dylan’s religious beliefs? I tend not to think so, because it makes no sense to just use the word Messianic by itself if that’s what you’re doing. But I give it consideration only because that at least would have some grounding in reality; there are many who do think that the kind of faith which Dylan appears to exhibit is very much along the lines of Messianic Judaism, or Hebrew Christianity. That would be to say, briefly speaking, that he embraces his Jewishness in a serious way while at the same time also believing that Jesus is indeed the Messiah spoken of in Scripture.

Be that as it may, if that’s what Giuseppe and Gaetano mean (which I doubt), then what bearing does that even have on the quality of Bob Dylan’s music since the early 1980s? Why single out his possible Messianic Judaism as being somehow a very bad thing? Michael Jackson’s forays into a variety of religious beliefs (ending with Islam) don’t disqualify Thriller from their list, after all. Why should Bob’s possible beliefs disqualify Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks? Then there’s the Beatles, U2, Pink Floyd; none of them can reliably be said to embrace every clause of the Nicene Creed, unless I’m gravely mistaken. Is this about a religious test?

No, I don’t think that it is. I think, in the end, it’s just about the rather pedestrian kind of taste in popular music that Giuseppe and Gaetano possess. Dylan is likely just beyond them. It’s no crime to have pedestrian taste in pop music, of-course, but for L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, to be used as a platform for the issuance of pronouncements in this regard seems strange to say the least. Pope Benedict: It may be time to call an editorial meeting.

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