At last! A tango-dancing pope

Just a year ago on this page I was writing about Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother Georg and how, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to his celebrated sibling, he contrived at the same time to make him look too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In a book, My Brother, the Pope, this old priest from Bavaria said that his younger brother had never wanted the job, was too physically frail for it, and found it a tremendous strain. Georg Ratzinger must now be feeling somewhat vindicated, but at the time he was ‘off message’, for the Vatican was insistent that the pope was on excellent form.

People in high office whose authority demands dignity are often embarrassed by their siblings, as several American presidents have found. And it is beginning to look as if Pope Francis I may have such a problem with his well-meaning sister, Maria Elena Bergoglio, who is 12 years his junior. Despite his age (76) and the fact that he has only one lung, she does not suggest that he isn’t fit enough to be pope. On the contrary, she has said he has ‘no physical limitations’. But then, as evidence of his vigour, she told the Daily Telegraph that he enjoyed dancing the tango. Well, really! She may have meant only in his youth before he embarked on a career in the priesthood; or so one must charitably assume, for it would be hard to imagine a more inappropriate activity for a pope.

The tango is an almost absurdly erotic dance, developed in the slums and brothels of Argentina before spreading like wildfire around the world. Georges Clemenceau, France’s first world war prime minister, said of it, ‘One only sees faces that are bored and bottoms that are enjoying themselves.’