ROME – Friday was among the most remarkable single days in the entire Pope Francis era, and given the way this papacy has generated non-stop thrills, chills and spills for more than 11 years now, that’s truly saying something.
It was a long day’s journey into night, beginning at 8.30am with a still-unexplained, but nonetheless deeply amusing, encounter with more than 100 comedians from around the world – virtually every one of whom, for the record, told reporters they had no idea what they were doing in the Vatican – and ended 14 hours later when Francis’s helicopter landed back in Rome, after the Pontiff spent several hours at a G7 summit in the southern Italian region of Puglia.
