Pope Francis addressed participants of the International Conference on the Progress of Regenerative Medicine and its Cultural Impact in the modern Paul VI audience hall on Friday. U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden also spoke at the conference. The next day, the locale for the entertainment for those in attendance was the Sistine Chapel.
Mister David Evans, known as "The Edge," is the lead guitarist for the rock and roll band "U2." Wearing his hat inside the Sistine Chapel on Saturday, he played four rock songs there (making history not even accomplished during the John Paul II papacy), one of them entitled "Yahweh."
Just eight years ago, under Pope Benedict, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued a letter "By directive of the Holy Father" to the bishops' conferences on the name of God:
...in recent years the concept has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel's proper name, known as the holy or divine tetragrammaton, written with four consonants of the Hebrew alphabet in the form יהוהYHWH.
...
Avoiding pronouncing the tetragrammaton of the name of God on the part of the church has therefore its own grounds. Apart from a motive of a purely philological order, there is also that of remaining faithful to the church's tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated.
...
In light of what has been expounded, the following directives are to be observed:
1) In liturgical celebrations, in songs and prayers the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton YHWH is neither to be used or pronounced.
Having made cacophonous history in the chapel where Francis was elected,"The Edge" praised him as "the people's pope" and declared: "He's doing an amazing job and long may he continue."
