I’m doing errands around the neighborhood when I notice Pope Frank, sitting on a park bench, smoking. We start talking, and I say I have a spiritual question. He looks at me, take a drag off his cigarette, and smiles. He says, “I’m off the clock.” Fair enough.
We agree to meet up later for dinner, and he drives off in an old black Mercedes — which he immediately ends up spinning out of control, and ends up driving onto the sidewalk.
Thanks for my first laugh of the day, Susie:)
Pope Frank should have a driver, dontchya think?
The cigarette represents his acceptance of behavior considered heretical by the Vatican establishment. The secondary meaning is, of course, that this non-conventional behavior is hazardous to his health and his reputation. His dodging of your “spiritual question” suggests that he considers the life of the spirit to be immanent and deeply personal. “Off the clock” means he is outside the strict confines of his role and wishes to retain grounding is his core self. The old black Mercedes represents the collaboration of the Vatican with Nazis in WW II andhis deep personal guilt and shame. The fact that the vehicle goes out of control means the Vatican’s long rationalization of its lack of opposition to the horrors of that time, rather than the specific actions in their historical context, were most responsible for beginning the ruination of the Church.
After all, if this were just a reflection of reality, or even a presaging of events to come, he would have been driving an old Fiat.