Vatican City was always going to be hard one in my quest to #ReadTheWorld. My intention was (and still is) to read a book from an author who was born in each country in the world. There are 197 countries in total according to the list I am using (Wikipedia) and I have 11 left to go.
Some countries have been very difficult for a number of reasons. Some have very little by way of literature, while some have regimen that have made writing literature almost impossible. Others have literature with next to none translated into English and I have been left with a range of foreign languages to read as I come towards my challenge’s conclusion.
Yet Vatican City was always going to be a problem. Whilst St. Peter’s and the Vatican have been around for many centuries, the sovereign state, Vatican City, has only been around since 1929. It was created through the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. I think Mussolini was involved somehow.
As far as I can find out, there has been nobody born in the Vatican City since then and nobody who has, therefore, written a book. To be honest, I knew that this was the case from the start and that I was always going to have to bend the rules when it came to the world’s smallest country. For completeness, there have been several hundred people born in the Vatican over the centuries but, again, I am not aware of any of them having written a book.
What, therefore, was I to do? I read that the Pope had written a book about the effect of AI on the global population and decided that this would fit the bill. While the Pope wasn’t born there, he certainly spends a lot of time there and AI is a subject that I am very interested in.
This choice led to another challenge in that I am an atheist. Whilst I am interested in other people’s faith I do not believe in some higher power yet realised that any book by a spiritual; leader was bound to stray significantly into religion. I held my nose, paid my money to swell the coffers of the Catholic Church and dived into ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ by Pope Leo XIV. At 144 pages it was going to be short read!
Despite the religious aspects, of which of course there were many, I found the book to be fascinating and in line with many of my own values and ways of thinking. It read as a manifest for good global government and was at complete odds with the Christain Fundamentalists and Nationalist rhetoric that you hear so much about these days, especially from the United States.
I enjoyed the book very much and learned so much yet this is the very reason that I set out on the #ReadTheWorld adventure in the first place. That is one more country to tick off my list.