I think he may be unusually flatulent and the papal robes would be flapping in the breeze.
Well, he doesn’t seem to be concerned about drinking in public. Hee!
Seafood what?
Maybe it has something to do with his choppers. My granny had bad teeth and she refused to eat in front of anyone cause it wasn’t a nice site. When she got fake teeth she could then eat again. It’s hard to chew with no molars.
So maybe the popes in the old times had this problem and it carried down.
I think it was meant to be seafood abroad.
I suspect that this whole issue is even more complicated than it might seem.
Except that she is usually only filmed during the speeches. As an example of the weirdness that can result, consider the case of the 2006 BBC series, The Great British Menu, one of the stranger products of British TV’s recent fondness for cookery programmes. The concept was that a bunch of semi-celebrity chefs competed to cook the various courses of the lunch hosted by the Lord Mayor of London to mark the Queen’s 80th birthday. The whole point was that they were creating dishes to be eaten by the Queen. And did the BBC show her eating any of them? Of course not. (Which is perhaps just as well, as some of her comments in the recent Monarchy series implied that she thought the resulting menu at bit odd.) When she has been shown eating, as in the BBC’s 1992 Elizabeth R documentary, it has been a news story.
But I know of nothing to suggest that this is some piece of formal royal protocol. I suspect commasense is right to say that the concern is to avoid looking undignified. I doubt it’s anything more than a rule of thumb that the Palace applies when organising her engagements.
The claim about the Pope may be less straightforward. One might ask why he would ever need to eat in public. It’s not as if he has to grab a bite on the way to work in the morning. And he can hardly pop out to the local trattoria for lunch. Yet dining is – and always has been – such a quintessential form of official protocol. Whether it is an early-modern monarch dining in state, deliberately set apart from his or her court, or a modern head of state hosting a state banquet with numerous guests, rulers have always known that how they are seen to dine sends out political messages. And the papacy does seem to be a peculiar case.
Until the reforms of Paul VI, the scale of the papal court was as grand as that of any European monarchy. Yet, unlike some ancien régime monarchies, the papal court never turned the everyday routines of its ruler’s life into public ceremonies. There was no lever, no coucher, and, more to the point, no dining in state. Popes usually lived in private. They tended to appear in public only for religious services, public processions and formal audiences. In fact, the types of occasions when they appeared in public weren’t so very different from modern papal appearances in Rome.
The classic example of a dinner attended by a modern head of state is the state banquet during a state visit. But no head of state ever makes a state visit to the Vatican. Instead, what they have is a papal audience. This continues the older conventions. Traditionally, there could be no more than an audience because no one was the Pope’s equal. This meant that the only acceptable public encounter between a Pope and another monarch was for that monarch to do homage. It was literally the case that the nearest anyone could get to being seen to be hanging out with the Pope was being allowed to kiss the toe of the papal slipper. Or, as a special favour, if you were the Holy Roman Emperor, helping him on and off his horse. Being seen to dine with him would have been unthinkable. Not that the papal court avoided formal hospitality. Quite the contrary. But, when there was a VIP visitor to entertain, it was the cardinals who would do so.
Admittedly, none of this will be why modern Popes don’t eat in public. But there are other reasons why it might be convenient for them to think of themselves as continuing the older traditions. A formal dinner would inevitably present the Vatican with an image problem. For the host and the chef, the temptation would always be for them to go down the stuffed-swan-and-larks’-tongue route. Less awkward if the Pope just tells them that he prefers to make his own arrangements. Strange how every modern Pope has been said to be an abstemious eater, fond of simple dishes, washed down with a single glass of wine. If we never see him eat, how would we know otherwise?
I know I didn’t offer any cites for my contention that she doesn’t eat in public, but last night I looked at hundreds of pictures of Liz, and found exactly none of her eating and only two of her holding up a glass in a toast, including this one (with the president of Estonia), which was clearly not taken by a professional photographer. So I’m going to modify my position slightly and say that she doesn’t permit cameras to be present while she’s eating, not that she never eats in the company of others. If you have evidence to the contrary, alphaboi867, I’d be interested in seeing it.
I suspect it’s something similar with the pope: eating in public risks bad pictures, messed up vestments, etc. More trouble than it’s worth. But I doubt it has anything to do with concerns about poison. After all, when dining with heads of state, this would not be a concern unique to him, if it is at all.
Well, that’s one thing to be said for having a German Pope.
APB will be one reason I will be sticking around another year.
Nothing makes you look less Vicar-of-Christ-like than a big bag of Funyuns in your lap.