What kind of music does Pope Benedict XVI like?
• Benedict loves Mozart and Bach. Of Mozart, Pope Benedict XVI said, “His music is by no means just entertainment. It contains the whole tragedy of human existence.” Pope Benedict XVI said that Mozart “thoroughly penetrated” his soul in his growing-up years in the 1920s and 1930s in rural Bavaria, near Salzburg, Austria, Mozart’s birthplace. Apparently he has little love for Bob Dylan — when the artist was invited to a gathering of 300,000 young Catholic pilgrims at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna in 1997, then-Cardinal Ratzinger recalled: “The Pope appeared tired, exhausted. At that very moment the stars arrived, Bob Dylan and others whose names I do not remember. They had a completely different message from the one which the Pope had. . . . “There was reason to be sceptical – I was, and in some ways I still am – over whether it was really right to allow this type of ‘prophet’ to appear.” Ratzinger’s most detailed views on rock music can be located in his address to the Int
