The Vatican is the setting for a brief but sharply observed episode in Andy Warhol’s April 1980 travels: a supposed private audience with the Pope proves to be a public gathering of 5,000 people. The visit moves from an exclusive invitation to crowded spectacle, autograph-seeking nuns, and a hurried exit, leaving the Vatican in the diary as both a religious destination and a stage for celebrity and improvisation.

The Journey and the Promise

On April 2, Warhol and Fred Hughes left Naples at seven in the morning to reach Rome for an audience they expected to be private. Their driver did not know how to enter the city, so they followed a cab to Graziella’s office to collect two tickets. Suzie, upset that the audience was too exclusive for her to attend, gave Hughes her cross to have blessed.

The tickets did not deliver the intimacy they had been promised. At the Vatican, Warhol and Hughes saw 5,000 other people waiting and realized that Graziella had not secured a private audience. Hughes nevertheless approached the guards as though the appointment were private; they laughed, and the pair were taken to seats among the crowd.

A Public Audience

The gathering made Warhol’s celebrity part of the event. A nun recognized him and asked for his autograph, and he signed for five more nuns. The encounter also made him nervous: he feared that one nun resembled Valerie Solanas and might pull out a gun. His unease continued as the crowds pressed around them and people jumped down from the seats behind them.

The Pope arrived on a gold car, circled the gathering, and delivered a speech against divorce in seven languages. Cheerleaders called out in support, and the proceedings lasted three hours. When the Pope reached them, he shook hands with the people present; Hughes kissed his ring and had Suzie’s cross blessed. Warhol also shook the Pope’s hand and said he was from New York, but did not kiss his hand. As photographers stood nearby, Hughes considered taking a Polaroid; Warhol worried that it would be mistaken for a machine gun, so they left without a photograph.

The Story Told Afterward

Once they had received the blessing, Warhol and Hughes ran out. Rather than tell Suzie what had actually happened, they decided to make up a more satisfying story over lunch at Piazza Navona. They told her that they had enjoyed a private audience, that the Pope had liked Hughes so much he invited them to lunch, and that he had forgotten to return her cross.

The Vatican episode thus ends not with the fulfillment of an exclusive encounter but with a fabricated version of one. The contrast between the crowded reality and the private-audience tale brings together the visit’s central details: access that proved illusory, celebrity that attracted attention even in a religious setting, and a blessed cross that became the prop around which the story to Suzie was built.