Rock Music: Il Papa brings on Dylan for a taste of the devil's rhythms

Tonight Bob Dylan will headline a concert in Bologna for the Pope and an audience of 300,000 young Catholics.

As the Church embraces `the devil's music', Andrew Gumbel finds that the Pontiff's latest bid to attract youngsters to the faith has struck more than a few wrong chords.

Never let it be said that Karol Wojtyla is a man without surprises. He may be tired and sick at the tail-end of a long papacy, but tonight - to the dismay of a number of his own senior clergy - he will be out there in an agricultural exhibition centre in Bologna swaying to the beat of Bob Dylan, Gianni Morandi and a clutch of other singers invited to help him celebrate Italy's 23rd National Eucharistic Congress.

For the first time in the history of the Church, the Pope is embracing rock'n'roll. He may be more than 30 years late in jumping on the bandwagon, but since we are talking about a genre that spawned the Summer of Love, Woodstock, psychedelia and punk, it is still a bold move for the leader of the world's Catholics.

Not that there will be any unpleasant surprises. The singers have been chosen for the spiritual values in their work, and their performances will be interspersed with a papal commentary on their lyrics. Most of the artists are Italian celebrities, such as Morandi and Lucio Dalla, but Bob Dylan will be out there on his own for a full half-hour, giving renditions of such well-worn classics as "Forever Young" and "Blowin' in the Wind".

The jamboree is expected to attract 300,000 people at the venue and millions more via a live television link-up. No doubt the Pope hopes to repeat the success of his recent trip to Paris, where several hundred thousand young people confounded the predictions of France's lay elite and turned out to give him an rapturous welcome.

Not everyone approves of the venture. For weeks, clergymen and Catholic writers have been murmuring about the dangers of over-commercialising the Church and, in the words of the prominent Italian commentator, Vittorio Messori, "turning the liturgy into a discotheque".

Passions reached boiling point just a few days ago when a number of Catholic singers, furious at being excluded from the concert, attacked the whole event as a dangerous flirtation with sin. "If I sing I get pelted, but since they are rock stars everything is okay," thundered a bitter Fr Giuseppe Cionfoli, a singing priest who recently dedicated a disc to the Pope entitled "For Christ,With Christ, In Christ". "So now they are giving a hero's welcome to a notorious communist like Dylan, a divorcee like Morandi and a man of dubious personal morals like Dalla ... One suspects they really have been tempted by the devil."

Gianni Rugginenti, director of a Christian recording company in Milan called Rusty Record, said the Pope's flirtation with rock reminded him of the freebies offered by newspapers in an effort to sell more copies. "True Catholics can only be left indifferent by Saturday's concert,"he said. "It will be just another occasion to commercialise everything."

Such outbursts have prompted the organisers to include one relatively unknown Catholic band called Manislegate in the programme. But that decision, coming at the same time as the French couturier Ted Lapidus announced his pleasure at being able to dress one of the artists in a slinky black and white number, has barely managed to calm the seething discontent.

Lay critics point out, with some justification, that the Pope should take better care of ecclesiastical music if he wants to avoid accusations of jumping onto a media bandwagon. Church music is virtually non-existent in Italy, partly due to a dearth of decent organs. Even the choir of the Sistine Chapel, which sings at formal papal occasions, suffers from an indifferent reputation - not helped by the reverberating acoustics of St Peter's.

Two churches in Rome with musical pretensions - the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, which boasts a full choir, and the church of Sant'Anselmo, which keeps up the tradition of plainsong - commit the cardinal musical sin of using loudspeakers during performances.

But if the Pope is borrowing more from the late 20th-century's PR techniques than he is from its musical traditions, what about the singers? What is in it for them? Dylan, it may be worth pointing out, has his first album in eight years coming out on Monday. Yesterday, after he arrived at Bologna airport, he denied any link between the two events.

One has to ask, however, what a 56-year-old Jewish folk hero who discovered Christianity 20 years ago, only to repudiate it again shortly afterwards, is doing in the middle of a celebration for Italian Catholics. The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.