I am not a Catholic. However, the combined importance of the Vatican as the seat of Papacy, as global spiritual center of the Roman Catholic Church, and as home of one of the holiest sites of Christianity, St. Peter’s Basilica, impresses me every time again. On Easter Sunday 2005, during an intense Rome sightseeing visit, my mother and I crossed over to Vatican City, entered St. Peter square to watch the Holy Mass. Pope John Paul II had been said to be seriously ailing for quite some time, so nobody expected the Pope himself offering Easter Blessings. St. Peter Square was full with thousands of faithful pilgrims (and with a few curious tourists like us) from all around the world. The Mass had already ended, as the crowd was about to disperse. Suddenly a window on the highest floor of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope’s residence, opened. A loud murmur went round the square – and there Pope John Paul was, visibly fatally sick, voicelessly offering his papal blessings, urbi et orbi, using his very last ounce of his strength. The window closed. Six days later, after having been 27 years at the helm of the Catholic Church, John Paul II died. After the following Papal conclave, German cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI. „We were Pope”, as a German tabloid newspaper put it.

My next meeting with a Pope happened on the occasion of World Youth Day 2013 in Rio de Janeiro where I was a resident these days. On Copacabana Beach where usually bathers in ultra-thin swimwear were frolicking and dancing in the waves, Pope Francis was celebrating a Holy mass for a crowd of three million. I happened to have a front seat, ringed by highest Catholic Clergy, mostly cardinals and bishops dressed in black robes and pink bishop mitres. Imveitably the collection of all my sins came to my mind. At night, Copacabana turned into a great tent city, while the young pilgrims from allover the world were chanting, drinking and shagging, often unmarried. The Catholic Church did not seem to care. 

Unlike to previous visits to the Vatican, my visit with a friend in 2018 (herself sometimes a staunch Catholic), was not just a small step from Rome to the Vatican, but a big step for me: I was for the first time not overnighting in Rome, but in the premises of the Vatican itself, matching the self-imposed rule that a country point may only count after at least a one-night stay. In the Sistine Chapel, I looked upwards to heaven towards Michelangelo’s „Creation of Adam“. in the Vatican Museums I was struck by „Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden“.

As we were now quasi residents of the Vatican with prime access, we quickly discovered the manicured landscapes of Vatican Gardens as our private Eden, drinking lots of red wine beneath a delicate fountain dedicated to the Virgin Mary , curiously watching members of the papal elite (all men of course) wandering along winding pathways lined with centuries-old trees and fragrant rose bushes, sometimes disappearing in ornate grottoes. Drunken or not, just gazing at the soft-blue dome of St. Peter gave me this rare feeling of eternity.