Pope against Bob Dylan, Jesuit for Tom Waits

Theological music news from the London Times:

The latest issue of Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit journal whose contents are subject to Vatican approval, says that [Tom] Waits represents “the marginalised and misunderstood”.

Father Antonio Spadaro, 40, who normally writes about literature but is emerging as a Roman Catholic authority on pop music, said that Waits had lived a youthful life of “drugs, alcohol and sex” as an outcast on the streets of California.

He therefore understood “the lower depths” of society, and was able to convey the desperation of those on the margins. His past also enabled him to express their “capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions”, Father Spadaro said.