Vatican City
Vatican City's Pope Benedict XVI became the 34th world leader to honor my request. The response consisted of an envelope and photo. There was no letter included in the correspondence.
With only 900 residents and at 0.2 square miles big the Vatican is the world's smallest country in both population and size. It therefore seems rather ironic that at the helm of government is one of the worlds most influential leaders. I feel honored and priviliged to have received a response.
What's most interesting about the letter is that it was sent from the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington instead of from the Vatican itself. As much as I try I cannot think of a compelling reason for doing so. It is clear the correspondence did actually originate in Europe because the inside of the envelope is marked with the name and phone number of it's Italian manafacturer.
Could the Vatican have wanted to save on international postage? Or maybe perhaps they had a unique reason for wanting the envelope to arrive in the United States via diplomatic pouch? This is very intriguing.
posted by Joel at 9:06 PM
5 Comments:
The Vatican probably gets a disproportionate number of request for autographs, so sending them from the embassies might indeed save a lot of postage. The envelope may just mean that the church has a central supplier and thus avoids the trouble of finding ISO-sized envelopes in the US.
Anonymous's explaination is far to logical for my taste... go with intrigue & the diplomatic pouch!
Please don't take this the wrong way, but since your site has a lot of potential and gets many hits, I suggest you
1. move it to a decent host with a non-Blogger template, and
2. Get someone to rewrite the entries (they are interesting but a bit repetitive, and the English...)
Again, I'm not out to offend, just offering my 2 cents.
-Bluelaptop-
Don't worry about what Bluelaptop says. Lest the journalists of this world focus too much on correct English, etc. and the rest of us on substance and ideas; just look at PostSecret: it’s simple but very engaging.
I'm curious - are you going to publish which leaders (208) you sent letters off to? Just curious since you now have the Pope, did you also send any to say the Dali Lama (sp?) or say the top Imam, Rabbi (if there are ones), etc. Also did Bush get one? Seems odd that it would take longer to get back to you than those from so many foreign dignitaries! Perhaps he concerned about guilt by association :D
That's a shame that they posted it from DC--Vatican City has lovely stamps. A friend of mine in Rome used to post all her letters from the Vatican, as its postal service is more reliable than the Italian one!
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