The pope and a puzzling African king

[emad]

The pope and a puzzling African king

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist | August 4, 2005

It is traditional for newly elected popes to adopt a new coat of arms, displaying heraldic imagery symbolizing their heritage or their attitudes toward the church. It has been widely noted, for instance, that a bishop's hat, or miter, sits atop Pope Benedict XVI's new coat of arms, and not a crown. That is viewed as an expression of the new pope's humility, that he comes not to reign over the church but to continue his work as one of God's servants.

Another prominent feature of the pope's new crest has also attracted attention: the picture of the ''African king" facing left on the coat of arms. For one thing, the portrait is practically a caricature of an African male, with exaggerated lips painted ruby red. ''It's not good," says Holy Cross professor of religious studies Matthew Schmalz, who has written about the crest for the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

There is little doubt why the image of the African king appears on the crest. It symbolizes the Pope's commitment to rallying Catholic worshipers in Africa, the fastest-growing province of the church. (In June, Benedict said he would summon a special synod of African bishops, the first since 1994.) ''For me, is an expression of the universality of the Church," the then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his 1998 book ''Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977." He also wrote that he did not know where the African image, which appeared on his coat of arms when he was archbishop of Munich-Freising, came from.

He is not alone. No one really knows who the African king might be. ''It probably strikes people as being really odd," Schmalz says. ''They look at it and think, 'What is going on here?' "

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/08/04/the_pope_and_a_puzzling_african_king/

IT'S either Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe....

[Cell Whitman]

1. here's B16's coat of arms

from EWTN:

http://www.ewtn.com/pope/life/arms.asp

Caput Aethiopum. According to the website of his former Archdiocese:

"The shield, which is divided into three sections, displays the “Moor of Freising." The Moor’s head, facing left and typically crowned, appeared on the coat of arms of the old principality of Freising as early as 1316, during the reign of the Bishop of Freising, Prince Konrad III, and it remained almost unchanged until the “secularization” of the Church’s estates in that region in 1802-1803. Ever since that time the archbishops of Munich and Freising have included the Caput Aethiopum, the head of an Ethiopian, in their episcopal coat of arms."

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. That's interesting.

Both the African King and the thing that looks like a tapir are in brown, which isn't a colour usually used in heraldry.