James Delingpole James Delingpole

I won’t be turning Catholic just yet

I didn’t get an audience with the Pope when I visited Rome last weekend. But given that he’s a borderline commie, an open borders advocate and an increasingly fervent evangelist for the climate-change religion, we probably wouldn’t have found much to say to one another. Nice art collection, though.

Well, it would be if you had it to yourself which of course you don’t. Even in the autumn off-season, the Vatican museums feel like shuffling in the midst of a zombie horde from The Walking Dead. I’m surprised the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel haven’t peeled off by now, what with the collected acid exhalations of the 25,000 tourists who pass through every day.

There’s only one way to do it: book the 8 a.m. Smug Tour, where you pay over the odds for privileged early access ahead of the crowds. Then reward yourself afterwards with a cappuccino in the gardens outside the café and watch the unwashed masses being prepared for their cultural experience. Arrayed along the pathways are perhaps two dozen boards, each with a reproduction of Michelangelo’s two sets of frescoes, each with a guide explaining to his or her group what the details signify. ‘Been there. Done that,’ you think. Smugly.

Is it worth it? Only so you can knock it off the list of items on your bucket list and then tell all your friends how thoroughly overrated it is. St Peter’s Basilica especially. What a blowsy, kitsch monstrosity that is. Some of my best friends are Catholics — the soundest of the sound — and I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of doing an Evelyn Waugh and joining them. But I didn’t come away thinking that the papacy is a very good recruitment advert.

Do you know it makes more than £80 million a year from tickets to its art collections alone? Yes, part of me was grateful that all those sculptures and mosaics and paintings had been kept safe in one heavily guarded collection for all eternity.

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