May 2, 2008
Shoes
Canon P D Quirk called the other day all in a twist over the pope’s visit, his getting so much media attention, and all of it so favorable. He was remembering Amanuensis Matthew’s take on Jesus’s counsel for the disciples when he sent them out exorcising on the dusty trail and the like. I looked it up: “Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff… ” (Mt 10.9).
The Canon said, if apostolic succession is all its cracked up to be, a copy of that note ought to be lying around the Vatican archives somewhere. I said, maybe it’s not all that handy. Whatever, the current Vicar of Christ must not have got the memo before he left to cast out the daemons in the promissory land.
Like he does so often, Quirk distracted me to reflecting. I don’t know about the economics of the pope’s trip, though I suspect it cost a bundle. But he did seem to have more than a few tunics, if only one walking staff. It’s the question of Jesus and the sandals that caught my eye. I remembered from Graham Greene’s book Monsignor Quixote that monsignors wear purple sox, and that it was the communist mayor who possessed that vital information. I suppose it’s only a few notches on the ladder from socks to the red shoes like the pope was wearing. I wondered whether he got them at Prada, so I looked up their website and found some almost identical ones there for about seven hundred bucks a pair.
I can’t fault Benedict, for I’ve purchased a few vestments off and on over the years. And I confess I’ve done so, myself, usually with more attention to apostolic success than to missionary accouterment. So I can more or less appreciate the pope’s oversight (aka episkopos) if that’s what it was.
As for the red shoes, the last time I saw Quirk, he was wondering whether Gucci’s Fifth Avenue might stock them. And as for me, I’ll just try to remember how much trouble Hans Christian Anderson’s little girl Karen got into for wearing hers.
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