Vatican City, Aug 31, 2006 / 22:00 pm
The traditional Vatican Christmas Concert performed every year at the Paul VI Auditorium, will be transferred to a location in Monaco, Vatican sources told the Italian newspaper, “La Stampa” today.
The concert, which had gathered a great number of pop and rock stars during the last 12 years, had not been saved from a few notable scandals.
In 2003, American singer Lauryn Hill broke from the program to go on a diatribe condemning the Church for the sex scandals in the US, before an audience of seven thousand five hundred people, including bishops and cardinals.
According to “La Stampa”, the decision to transfer the annual concert, whose collection is used for Church charities, has less to do with Pope Benedict’s musical taste, who prefers classical music to rock, than with the association between the Vatican and an event that gathered famous, but often controversial, people.
Last year, the coordinator of the event was forced to cancel an invitation to Brazilian singer Daniela Mercury, when she joked on a TV program that she would take advantage of her visit to the Vatican to promote condoms as a way to prevent AIDS.