At a time when they surely have bigger things to think about, the Vatican's official newspaper has published a glowing appraisal of the Beatles, calling their music "beautiful" and dismissing their years of drug use and excessive living. On the front page of the L'Osservatore Romano, the paper admits that the band once "said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages, that were possibly even Satanic", but also asks: "what would pop music have been like without the Beatles?"

The article comes four decades after John Lennon enraged the Catholic church by saying the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" and suggesting that Christianity was a dying institution. The newspaper eventually offered its forgiveness for these comments in a 2008 article, when it ascribed Lennon's remarks to "showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success". The 2008 piece, which praised the White Album for remaining a "magical musical anthology", came shortly after the appointment of Giovanni Maria Vian as new editor. The paper has since taken to publishing articles on entertainment and the arts, as well as traditional news about the Pope's activities.

The timing of its latest effusive piece on the Beatles coincides with mounting focus on the Vatican's response to claims of institutional sexual abuse within the Catholic church. The latest edition of L'Osservatore Romano acknowledged the controversy by saying there was international "support for the Pope".